CALRBS Faculty
Susan M. Allen
Associate Director and Chief Librarian, Research Library
Getty Research Institute
Susan M. Allen was appointed the first chief librarian of the Research Library and Associate Director at the Getty Research Institute in June 1999. Previously, she was head of the Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles from January 1997 to 1999; and director of Libraries and Media Services at Kalamazoo College from 1993 to 1997. Prior to 1993, she held several posts in the Libraries of the Claremont Colleges, including head of Special Collections.
Dr. Allen currently is chair of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Standing Committee of the International Federation of Library Associations. She also serves on the Council of the Bibliographical Society of America; the board of the American Printing History Association; the Steering Committee of the California Preservation Program; and the Board of Visitors and Governors of St. John's College. From 2003-2005 she served on the executive committee and board of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, and from 2001-2006 she served on the RLG Board. She has spoken often and published extensively on rare book theft and library security, undergraduate use of rare books and manuscripts, the future of research libraries, and history of the book topics. She teaches regularly at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and the California Rare Book School.
Dr. Allen received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a further master's from St. John's College in New Mexico, and her Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from UCLA.
William P. Barlow
William P. Barlow, Jr. is a partner in the San Francisco accounting firm of Barlow & Hughan. He has advised many individuals and institutions on bibliographical tax matters both in a professional capacity and as an officer of library friends’ groups.
Terry Belanger
Terry Belanger is a historian, collector, and protector of one of humankind's greatest inventions: the book. To support the study of the book's long history, Belanger created a teaching and archive facility, the Rare Book School (RBS), in 1983 as part of Columbia University's School of Library Service; in 1992, he moved it to its current home at the University of Virginia. The RBS functions as an independent, non-profit institute devoted to the histories of manuscripts, print, electronic text, and everything in between. It transcends the limitations of traditional degree programs by making its wide-ranging offerings available to a broad range of professionals interested in studying and preserving these cultural artifacts; historians, literary scholars, librarians, conservators, collectors, and book artists attend RBS courses each year. In the classroom, Belanger uses original tools and materials to provide students with hands-on experience and to emphasize the relationship between the physical and intellectual structure of the book. He assiduously collects items related to bookmaking, from the remains of incunabula (the first printed books of the fifteenth century) and their handwritten precursors to books demonstrating the range of bindings and structures, to samples of materials from which books have been constructed.
Terry Belanger received a B.A. (1963) from Haverford College and an M.A. (1964) and Ph.D. (1970) from Columbia University. He was on the faculty of the School of Library Service at Columbia University (1971-1992), where he served as assistant dean (1980-86). He established the Book Arts Press (1971) at Columbia as a bibliographical laboratory for the training of rare book and special collections librarians and antiquarian booksellers. In 1983, he instituted the Rare Book School, also at Columbia. Belanger moved both the Book Arts Press and Rare Book School to the University of Virginia in 1992, where he now holds the position of University Professor and Honorary Curator of Special Collections.
Carl Berkhout
Carl T. Berkhout is a Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where since 1982 he has taught medieval literature and languages, research methods, and the study and description of medieval manuscripts and early printed books. Earlier he taught at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his PhD (1975), and at the University of Dallas. At Notre Dame he was a member of the Library faculty and Curator of the Medieval Institute's collections.
From 1976 through 2000 Berkhout served as Bibliographer of the Old English Division of the Modern Language Association. He has published numerous papers on bibliographic subjects, on Old English and other early texts, and on forged or questioned documents.
Lynda Claassen
Lynda Corey Claassen has served, since 1983, as director and chief curator of the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego. She has also held positions as slide and photograph curator at Cornell University, special collections librarian at Mills College, special consultant at the Smithsonian Institute, and special consultant at the Library of Congress. For twelve of her years at UCSD, Claassen also held the position of Library Development Officer.
Claassen is the author of Finders' Guide to Prints and Drawings in the Smithsonian Institute (1981), and she speaks and writes frequently on collection development, academic fundraising, artists' books, and the use of special collections in undergraduate education. She has been active in ACRL's Rare Books & Manuscripts Section for more than twenty years, most recently serving as preconference program chair in 2003 and chair of the Section's Budget & Development Committee.
Claassen received her B.A. in art history from Smith College, pursued graduate work in architectural history at Cornell University, and earned an M.L.S. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Gary Kurutz
Gary Kurutz has served as Director of the Special Collections Branch of the California State Library in Sacramento since 1980. Previously, he held positions as Head Librarian, Sutro Library; Library Director, California Historical Society; and Bibliographer of Western Americana at the Henry E. Huntington Library.
Kurutz has written extensively on the California Gold Rush including The California Gold Rush: A Descriptive Bibliography of Books and Pamphlets Covering the Years 1848-1853 (San Francisco: The Book Club of California, 1997); "You Have Mail: Readings and Writing During the golden Era," The Book Club of California Quarterly News-Letter (Summer 1999); "Rooted in Barbarous Soil: Popular Culture on the Golden Shore," in a Sesquicentennial Issue of California History (Summer 2006).
A native of La Cañada, California, Kurutz received an M.A. in history from the University of San Diego and a master's degree in Library Science from the University of Southern California. Currently, he serves as Executive Director of the California State Library Foundation and has been in charge of the publication program of the Book Club of California since 1987.
Deborah J. Leslie
Deborah J. Leslie is Head of Cataloging at the Folger Shakespeare Library, a position she has held since 1999. She has worked as a rare book cataloger since 1992, first at the Library Company of Philadelphia and then at Yale.
Leslie has had a long association with the ALA Rare Book and Manuscripts Section Bibliographic Standards Committee, as member, Thesaurus Editor, and finally Chair of that committee from 2001-2007. She was chief editor of Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books), published in 2007.
Leslie has taught Rare Book Cataloging at the Rare Book School (University of Virginia) since 1998, as well as at California Rare Book School in 2006, the Australasian Rare Book School in New Zealand in 2007, and Oslo in 2001.Leslie received a B.A. in history from California State University, Fresno (1981); an M.A. in history from Indiana University (1983), and an M.L.S. with a specialization in rare book bibliography and in cataloging from UCLA (1990). She holds memberships in the Bibliographical Society of America and the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia.
Mark S. Roosa
Mark Roosa is Dean of Libraries at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California where he directs libraries on the Malibu campus and throughout the Los Angeles area. Prior to joining Pepperdine, Mr. Roosa was Director for Preservation at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C where he was responsible for the activities of the Preservation Directorate's five divisions and two special programs which together provided care for more than 128 million items in a myriad of formats. Prior to moving to Washington, Mr. Roosa served as Chief Conservation Officer at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California where he directed a program to care for an extensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, photographs and works on paper pertaining to American History and Literature, Western Americana and the History of Science. Before joining the Huntington, Mr. Roosa was Preservation Officer at the University of Delaware Library. During that time he co-authored, Preservation Program Models: a Study Project and Report for the Association for Research Libraries.
Mr. Roosa maintains a life-long passion for libraries, research, learning and preservation of the cultural record as embodied in books, films, photographs, sound recordings and other media. In recent years he has been particularly interested in the preservation of music, including the development of new techniques for extracting speech and music from antique sound carriers.
Roosa received his bachelor's degree in Music from the University of Minnesota, his M.L.I.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, and post graduate certification in preservation administration from Columbia University. In 2006, Mr. Roosa was a UCLA Senior Fellow. Mr. Roosa, his wife Alexandra and their daughter Bronwen reside in Los Angeles.
Daniel J. Slive
Daniel J. Slive is Reference and Special Projects Librarian in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, where the holdings include major collections of Pacific Voyages and Baja California. Prior to this position, he was an Associate in the Americana Department of the William Reese Company (2004-2007), a leading antiquarian firm specializing in the history of the Americas, Pacific Voyages, world travel, and natural history prior to 1900 as documented in books, manuscripts, and illustrated materials. In this position, he was primarily responsible for the cataloguing and description of Latin Americana and European Americana as well as British North American and Caribbean imprints, particularly of the colonial period. Previously, he was the Rare Books Librarian in the UCLA Library’s Department of Special Collections (1998 – 2004) and Reference Librarian / Coordinator of Reader and Bibliographic Services at the John Carter Brown Library (1988-1998). He holds an M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign; an M.A. in Ibero-American Studies (with an emphasis on colonial Latin America and Amerindian-Colonial relations) from the University of Wisconsin at Madison; and an A.B. in English Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His interests in Latin Americana include colonial-era imprints, works printed in Amerindian Languages, and illustrated books published throughout the region in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries.
David Szewczyk
David Szewczyk, a full partner in The Philadelphia Rare Books and Manuscripts Company, has been in the rare books and manuscripts business for more than 25 years and is a Past President of the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Associations of America. He currently sits on that association’s board of governors. He holds a B.A. from Temple University in History and Spanish, M.A. degrees from Indiana University in the same disciplines, and has done post-Master’s work at the University of Texas at Austin. He has held multiple Fulbright fellowships as well as a Ford Foundation scholarship, and was the Principal Investigator of a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to catalogue colonial-era Mexican manuscripts. He worked for the Lilly Library and was the manuscripts curator at the Rosenbach Foundation (now the Rosenbach Museum & Library). Since 1968 he has made a continuing study of the history of printing and book distribution in the New World during the colonial period in the region.
Bruce Whiteman
Bruce Whiteman is the Head Librarian at The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Before coming to California in 1996, he was Head of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at McGill University in Montreal, after starting his professional career as the Research Collections Librarian at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has taught descriptive bibliography in the library schools of both McGill University and UCLA.
Bruce Whiteman’s research interests include forgery, bibliography, the history of collecting, and printing and publishing history. He has published books on the history of publishing in Quebec, the Canadian artist J.E.H. MacDonald, and the Canadian poet Raymond Souster. His descriptive bibliography of Raymond Souster was published in 1984. He edited The Letters of John Sutherland 1942-1956, and was the co-editor of the catalogue for a major inter-institutional exhibition in Los Angles, The World from Here: Treasures of the Great Libraries of Los Angeles. He is also a published poet, and his The Invisible World Is in Decline, Books I-VI appeared in 2006.
Bruce Whiteman attended Trent University (B.A.) and the University of Toronto (M.A. and M.L.S.). He is currently working on a Ph.D. in Musicology at UCLA.
David S. Zeidberg
David S. Zeidberg is the Avery Director of the Huntington Library. Founded in 1919 by Henry E. Huntington, railroad magnate and southern California land developer, the Huntington Library today is one of America’s leading independent research libraries. Its holdings include more than 750,000 books, 4.5 million manuscripts, and 800,000 prints and photographs. The library’s subject strengths include British and American history and literature; Californiana and western Americana; history of science, technology and medicine; and printing history. Research is focused at the post-doctoral level; approximately 1,700 scholars from all over the world are admitted annually through an application process. The Research Division of the Huntington awards more than 120 fellowships annually.
Mr. Zeidberg was graduated summa cum laude from Windham College, Putney, Vermont. He holds a Masters in Medieval & Renaissance English Language & Literature, and a Masters in Library & Information Science, both from Syracuse University. He has served as a rare books librarian at Syracuse (1972-75), Curator of Special Collections at George Washington University (1975-1984), and Head of Special Collections at UCLA (1984-1996) before assuming his duties at the Huntington in March, 1996. He has written on topics such as teaching using primary resources, library security, and the future of special collections libraries in the age of technology. He has given lectures on the marketing of books in the 15th century and is working toward publishing these as a collection of essays. He was the editor of a collection of essays, Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1998), and of The Huntington Library: Treasures from Ten Centuries (London: Scala, 2004).
