Elizabeth Perenyi is a very familiar face (or at least name and voice) to many of us here at CUL. As the long-time caretaker of CUL’s many thousands of serials records, Elizabeth regularly interacts with selectors, catalogers, vendors, and accounting staff in the course of her work. Everyone who works with Elizabeth knows and respects her knowledge of our serials acquisitions process, her efficiency, and her unflappable approach to tasks small or complex. In honor of her 40th anniversary with us in LTS, we thought it would be a good time to let Elizabeth’s colleagues know a bit more about her and her long history of service to Cornell.

Elizabeth’s CUL debut took place on December 4th, 1967. Her first appointment was temporary; she was hired for a three-month stint to help reduce a serials ordering backlog. Fortunately, when the appointment ended, Elizabeth stayed on, and she spent the next several weeks on a new assignment: filing cards in the union catalog. (Those were the days …) While busily placing her cards in their drawers, a regular position opened up in the serials department, ending Elizabeth’s temp status and setting her on the long road leading to four decades of varied and dedicated service.

And varied it has been. Elizabeth’s duties over the years have included serving as administrative secretary; working on the CONSER project with Lolly Hayes (CUL was among the first CONSER libraries, joining over 30 years ago); and working as a serials cataloger for six years in the 1980s. At the end of that decade, Elizabeth assumed the administrative supervisor role that she fills today, sharing the responsibility for receiving duties with Mary Wesche until technical services integration split the serials group from acquisitions in 2005. With the formation of the new E-Resources and Serials Management Unit, Elizabeth left Olin and moved to Mann Library, where her six-person unit is currently based. There, she and her charges are responsible for serial pre-order searching and record creation; pre-catalog searching; ordering of print serials and online periodicals; invoice approvals; serials check-in; claiming and record maintenance of serials acquisitions’ holdings records; and maintenance of bibliographic records for ceased publications. Elizabeth also works closely with her colleagues in the unit who manage CUL’s e-resources, and she remains a liaison and trainer for unit library check-in staff.

Elizabeth is a native of Hungary. She grew up in a small village called Écs (the village has a Web site which has a picture of the school Elizabeth attended from the 5th to 8th grades at: http://www.ecsfalu.hu/Fot%F3k_Iskola.htm). After grade 8, Elizabeth attended school and worked in the city of Gyor, a thousand-year old town that sits at the junction of the Danube, Raba, and Rabca rivers and is on the Slovakian border, about halfway between Budapest and Vienna. (Pictures and a description of Gyor can be found at: http://www.world66.com/europe/hungary/gyor). She came to the United States on May 28, 1965 and has spent nearly all of her life in the US in Ithaca.

When not untangling the many mysteries of serials here at CUL, Elizabeth enjoys being outdoors, puttering in her vegetable and flower gardens. No doubt she brings the same meticulous care to her gardens that she does to the increasingly complex world of serials management at work. We congratulate Elizabeth on her four decades of exemplary service to Cornell and hope to have the pleasure of working with her for years to come.