To oversee the integration of the campus’ five separate special collections into a single department, Tom Hyry has been appointed director of special collections by the UCLA Library.
Hyry, who is currently the head of the manuscript unit at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, will fill the newly created position beginning March 29, said Gary Strong, university librarian.
“Part of what makes Tom very attractive is that he comes with a breadth of experience at Yale and at the Beinecke Library,” Strong said. “He also comes with an enthusiasm and an excitement about coming to UCLA and being in charge of one of the largest special collection units in any research library in North America. It’s a tremendous opportunity for him and for us.”
The restructuring of the special collections department will be an ongoing process that reflects the broader changes occurring in the profession, Hyry said.
“There are opportunities with technology that we haven’t had before to make materials available, either through digitization or pushing information about our holdings out to users,” he added.
“UCLA has a terrific collection of rare books, manuscripts and archival holdings, and we are in a really exciting phase of moving special collections out from these little rooms in the basement of libraries to trying to make these amazing resources available to everyone.”
The special collections are currently spread over the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library History and Special Collections for the Sciences, the Center for Oral History Research, the Performing Arts Special Collections, the Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections and the University Archives.
The point of the integration is not to physically consolidate the five collections into one place but to reorganize the workflow of all five units into one, Strong said.
“We’re looking at an internal structuring,” Strong said. “So instead of five units that acquire materials, we would build one process to acquire materials. There would be one team to do processing instead of five.”
The integration will ultimately make it easier and more efficient for users to access the material they want, said Kevin Mulroy, associate university librarian for academic services.
“Right now, say we have artists’ books in all five of the special collections units on campus, so somebody wanting to conduct research in that area would have to navigate the whole campus in order to do that,” Mulroy said. “We want to make things much simpler for our users and be able to serve them in the best way.”
By combining the workflow from the five special collections units into one, the staff of each unit will also be able to provide better service to library patrons, Mulroy said.
“Some of the units are administratively challenged as it is,” he said. “For example, the University Archives has a staff of two who are responsible for maintaining the archives, so we’re looking at how we might free up (staff) so those individuals can do other things, like focus on providing services to researchers.”