I am in no way attempting to create an evidenced-based scholarly study on employment movements. This is an attempt to satisfy my recent fascination with data visualization and curiosity to use them to inspire discussion. On August 4, 2015, sometime in the morning, I took data from the employment opportunities advertised on the LITA Job site in order to see some trends. The jobs are posted under the regions Northeastern, Southern, Midwestern, and Western Regions; none posted outside of the United States at the time of my mini-experiment. This information may be helpful to current job seekers or folks currently employed who may be interested in areas to venture out or compliment their current repertoire. I hope these visualizations will conjure some discussion or ideas. Out of the sixty-seven total ads listed, 34 were from universities, 14 from colleges, 9 from public libraries, and 10 from other libraries such as vendors or special libraries.
Job Titles
As librarians, we master the art of keyword searching but sometimes we may struggle with finding those specific words that can bring back that needed information. This may happen with job searching. Library, librarian and technology as keywords can only take you so far. In the past, when looking for employment, I felt I may be unaware of exciting jobs out there due to not knowing the magic terms.
After visualizing the job titles on the list, I discovered I like reading the more obscure words rarely used. These terms are a helpful way to understand duties, but also motivate you. Take for instance the enticing words included on some; emerging, collaborator, integrated, initiative, or innovation. I especially love the job title Data and Visualization Librarian, posted by Dartmouth College Library.
Duties and Required/ Preferred Qualifications
Out of the 67 current posts, 44 positions had this information readily available, 23 were filled, a broken link, or the link provided lead to the homepage or job search page of the organization.
After you get passed the usual words that pop out, there may be knowledge from the smaller, more obscure words. For programmers, the usual contenders were CSS (cascading style sheets), Java, XSL (EXtensible Stylesheet Language), APIs (Application programming interface), and RDF (Resource Description Framework). I was not aware of MVC. It seems that ASP.NET MVC is a Microsoft web and app creation tool. Microsoft has wonderful tutorials at http://www.asp.net/mvc . Another learning experience came from a somewhat prominent acronym – RIS. RIS is a standardized tagging system used to effectively interchange citation information between platforms. XML’s XPath and D3 were also new to me. Some areas to possibly develop your skills are in RDA (Resource Description & Access) and 3D software and printing.
This small exercise gave me, not only a small snippet of employment information to be aware of, but gave me more respect towards the use of word clouds.
Word Cloud Web Tools:
Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/
Word Cloud Generator: https://www.jasondavies.com/wordcloud
WordSift: http://www.wordsift.com/
TagCrowd: http://tagcrowd.com/