Welcome Peter Rolla

Please join us in welcoming Peter Rolla to the William H. Hannon Library! Peter is our new Cataloging Librarian. Peter has been a cataloging librarian at both Stanford University and the University of Colorado at Boulder. More recently, he managed technical services at Harvard’s medical library, and then directed content acquisitions and resource sharing at the University of California San Diego’s Library.

In order to get to know Peter a little better, we asked him a few questions about coming to LMU:

What goals do you have for this year as the new Cataloging Librarian?

My main goal, of course, is to get fully trained in my job duties and to learn all I can about the William H. Hannon Library and its procedures so that I can get fully up to speed on my cataloging work. This will involve, among other things, learning the details of cataloging media resources like DVDs. Another goal is to get involved professionally, such as serving on a committee or writing presentations or papers. My most recent job wasn’t in cataloging, so I need to figure out what kind of professional work will be the most important for me and for the Library.

How has your prior experience prepared you for this role at the William H. Hannon Library?

I spent eight years, over two different jobs, as a cataloging librarian, so I have a lot of experience in this area. In those jobs I learned how to catalog using the highest national standards set by the Library of Congress. For the past five years I’ve been engaged in acquisitions work, but all of my cataloging knowledge is still there under the surface and for the most part it’s like riding a bike, and it’s all coming back to me.

What project(s) will you be tackling first? Tell us more about it/them.

The greater national and international library cataloging community has an extensive identity management database called the Name Authority File which governs, among other things, the form an author’s name that we use in the Library’s catalog. I’m currently taking a training from the Library of Congress through January that will allow me to independently create and edit the records in this database. With this knowledge, and the authorization that comes with it, I’ll be able to create records for local authors and institutions which other libraries may miss. I will also run reports on our local authority file to find all of the records that we’ve edited locally and not in the national database, and I will make whatever edits are necessary to align that work with the national records.

What are you currently reading/watching/listening to?

I have eclectic but geeky tastes in books and TV. On the reading front, I’m about to start a series by the fantasy author Tanya Huff, whose work I’ve enjoyed a lot. On television, I’ve discovered that Netflix and services like that get a lot of international shows and I’ve found some comedies that I really like: “Derry Girls” from Northern Ireland and “Kim’s Convenience” from Canada are two favorites, and I’m in the middle of a soap opera/comedy from Sweden called “Bonus Family”.

We are delighted to have Peter on our staff at the William H. Hannon Library. You can contact him at peter.rolla@lmu.edu.