LAUC-LA 2000 Librarian of the Year Award

Kate Pecarovich

It is with great pleasure that LAUC-LA names Kate Pecarovich Librarian of the Year, in recognition of her ongoing contributions and leadership in ORION2 activities, and her recently completed key role in designing the new UCLA Law Library. Kate has enriched her fellow librarians and the entire UCLA Library community through her work in these areas, and has demonstrated the qualities of intellectual creativity, innovation, and leadership repeatedly throughout her twenty-year career at UCLA. Because of Kate's distinguished contributions, all UCLA libraries have ready access to complete and accurate holdings of the Law Library, and the Law Library is also a beautiful study facility with an inviting and useful collection design.

During the ORION1 years, Kate made vitally important resources visible to the community at large by her efforts on two major projects. She converted the massive file of legal serials records to ORION format, and also designed a way to convert and integrate the sizable collection of the Law Library's uncataloged government documents into ORION. As if this weren't enough, Kate also almost single-handedly reclassified nearly 60,000 law items from an old Yale-Columbia classification system into the Library of Congress classification system, making the records accessible for all library users. All of these efforts are indicative of the great weight that Kate places on the public service aspect behind Technical Services.

Kate saw the development of ORION2 as an opportunity to solve the many problems that ORION1 presented to patrons when they attempted to ascertain the status of supplemented materials. As part of the Data Migration Team, Kate helped to create algorithms that would assure that multiple supplementation records would properly migrate to the catalog record. In addition, Kate was a member of the ORION2 Implementation Steering Team, and Chair of the OCLC/DLA Data Exchange Team. These are only a few examples of Kate's contributions to ORION1 and ORION2 which provided comprehensive holdings information for UCLA Law Library materials.

During the past several years, Kate has served as a member of the Law Library Building Committee and was involved in every aspect of the building planning, from air conditioning to chair selection. Kate was also appointed chair of the Collection Configuration Subcommittee of the Building Committee, because of her in-depth knowledge of the project, and her skill in organizing and executing complex projects. Because of Kate's hard work and leadership skills, the UCLA Community has a beautiful library facility with a collection arrangement that has been endorsed by the entire Law Library staff, and that works for the all of the library's users. Law School Dean Jonathan Varat acknowledged Kate's significant contributions at the library's dedication in January of this year.

Kate has earned the admiration and respect of all who have worked with her, and she has been an inspiring role model. Kate has demonstrated unwavering commitment to providing the best possible access to the Law Library's collections, and her efforts have quite literally transformed the Law Library for many years to come. Kate has demonstrated steady leadership, vision, professionalism, and creative thinking throughout her career, and for all these reasons she deserves to be publicly acknowledged as Librarian of the Year.

Committee on LAUC-LA Librarian of the Year Award, 1999/2000

Alan Carr, Biomedical Library (Chair)

Anita Colby, Science & Engineering Library

Linda Maisner, Law Libray