Tonight I was pleased to come across placement surveys on the Faculty of Information & Media Studies website (University of Western Ontario).
These surveys, taken by Library and Information Science (LIS) grads between 2003 and 2008, offer insight into things like how long it took them to find work, salary, types of jobs, length of job search, and location of placement.
If you’re considering library school–or looking for library work–I’d definitely recommend taking a look at them. They do not provide a full and complete picture of what the job hunt is like right now across the country, but they do still shed some light on the realities facing library school graduates over the last decade.
I would also recommend taking a look at the following blog post. It provides a lot of great advice on applying for library jobs from the perspective of an employer, including valuable advice on writing cover letters:
The author, Rick Roche, also provides a number of insights into the profession of librarianship as a whole. For instance, Roche points out that new librarians need to explore non-traditional professions, and be prepared for the risk of being unemployed or under-employed. Furthermore, he argues that library schools need to scale back their enrolment numbers. I concur. With several library schools in Canada alone churning out graduates (in addition to US schools and online MLIS programs), supply is increasingly exceeding demand.
