At the time of its creation in May 1995, it was the first online guide to library job postings. I created it because new grads like me needed something to use. Now, my site isn't the only one, but it's still going strong. Since I began accepting individual ads in 1997, I've posted at least 25 job ads each week. This works out to over 10,000 individual job ads over the past eight years. Since the ads are now part of the Combined Job Postings page, the number posted per week is even higher. As of May 1, 2005, this site receives an average of 11,500 hits and 1700 sessions (unique visits) every weekday. See Some Statistics for more details. Contest alert! For this special event, please drop me a line to let me know how and why you use the site, and whether it has been helpful to you. Has it helped you get a job? Has it helped you find good candidates? View the guest book listing comments received. I will be giving away copies of The Information Professional's Guide to Career Development Online to two randomly selected people who send me their comments about this site during May 2005. Include a mailing address if this interests you. Even if you don't want a copy of the book, I'd still like to hear your thoughts. Use the comments form. Thanks! A little history: This website was created while I was conducting my first library job search during the end of 1994 and early 1995. It started out as a list of bookmarks in my computer account. At the time, I had a job as a student assistant in the Information and Library Studies Library (ILSL) at the University of Michigan, and noticed that a lot of my fellow classmates were stopping by the library to go through classified ads in the print literature. At the time, I also created a guide to job postings in the professional literature (which is still maintained by ILSL) as well as a web-based guide containing links to library employment sites on the Internet. This original site was first posted on the website of the University of Michigan Libraries in May 1995, and contained approximately 25 links to gopher and web-based employment sites for librarians. In August 1995, I accepted my first professional library position as a reference librarian at Bridgewater State College. I first found out about the job through a posting made on COLLIB-L, which I didn't subscribe to, but the archives were made available through the Texas State Electronic Library (now defunct). Here is a page showing Library Job Postings in early 1997, courtesy of the Wayback Machine. The site didn't change significantly between 1995 and then. In June 1997, the clickable US map first came into being. (Horrible colors, sorry) I was very happy to learn how to create image maps. I also started addressing the fact that dozens of people were sending me job ads to post, so I created a page that listed individual job ads. On May 7, 1998, I moved the site to my personal web space at Bridgewater State, and it didn't look too different from what it does now. The site celebrated its fifth birthday in May 2000, and I got my own domain in December 2001. At the same time, my first book was published: The Information Professional's Guide to Career Development Online, co-authored with Rachel Singer Gordon of Lisjobs.com. The site remained the same when I moved to Charleston, Illinois to take a job at Eastern Illinois University in February 2002. In November 2003, Rachel and I combined our individual job ads to form the Combined Library Job Postings page, which we jointly maintain. Around the same time, we developed the Beyond the Job career development blog. Lastly, in December 2004, we automated the job posting function. Employers can now post their job ads in an online form and have the ads appear online quickly, often within hours. Special thanks to TeamWorks Media for the help with this. Some Statistics: Now hosted on LISHost.com, Library Job Postings receives an average of 11,500 hits and 1700 sessions (visits) every weekday. The day of the week makes a big difference:
These stats exclude the page with newly received ads (http://www.lisjobs.com/jobs),
which lives on Lisjobs.com. The stats work out about the same regardless of the week. Thanks for visiting my site, and best of luck in the job search, whatever side of the table you're on!
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Happy
10th Anniversary to Library Job Postings!