Meet Rhonda Lawrence, Head of Cataloging
Rhonda Lawrence, the Library’s Head of Cataloging, has worked in the UCLA Law Library since 1989. As the co-author of three editions of Cataloging Legal Literature: a manual on AACR2R and Library of Congress subject headings for legal materials, Rhonda is one of the foremost authorities in American legal cataloging. She is also very active and well-known in national library associations.
Law librarianship is a second career for Rhonda. Fresh out of college with her B.S. in English and a minor in Inner City Education from Iowa State, she taught junior and senior high school English for four years at an inner city school in Knoxville, Tennessee. Rhonda originally decided to go to library school to become a school librarian. But she entered the UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Fall 1978, just after California’s Proposition 13 was passed, which made employment prospects for school librarians pretty dismal. While in library school she became interested in government documents and legal research after working at the now defunct Public Affairs Service on the A-level of the Young Research Library.
Rhonda’s first job after library school was as a government documents librarian with the L.A. County Public Library. Returning to UCLA to take courses in law librarianship and legal bibliography, she was offered a job as a cataloger for the L.A. County Law Library while interviewing the library director for a research paper. She had taken four or five cataloging classes while in library school, and discovered that she really enjoyed it. She had always wanted to return to UCLA, so seven years later when a cataloging job opened up in the law library, she applied for it.
Rhonda loves working at UCLA and enjoys her wonderful colleagues (in fact, she met her husband of 13 years here, Professor Arthur Rosett). Rhonda confesses that she also has a thing about organizing, to the extent that she arranges her husband’s shirts by sleeve length, color and pattern!
Her personal interests include gardening (the library often benefits from her gorgeous flower garden), playing Mah Jonng with other law library staff, reading mysteries, and singing in a choir, which she has done for as long as she can remember. In high school, her honors chorus was selected to attend the Salzburg Music Festival. Rhonda still sings in her church choir and she loves belting out the “Star Spangled Banner” at sporting events.
Rhonda has two cats in her household: a 14-month old Maine Coon cat, Dr. Watson (left), and the recently adopted Don Pio Pico (right), a 12-week old Ragdoll cat. She had hoped that the new cat would distract Dr. Watson from one of his favorite pastimes, hanging out in her bathroom sink, but now she finds that she has two cats in her sinks. (Follow the web link to see that this is appears to be a common practice among cats!)
Rhonda is quite the movie buff and has won the library’s Oscar pool more often than not. I am trying to encourage Rhonda to contribute regular movie reviews to this blog, so look for those in the future!