Olendorf appointed Director of Natural Resources Library and Research Engagement Librarian

We are very pleased to announce the appointment of Robert Olendorf to the position of Director of the Natural Resources Library and Research Engagement Librarian effective February 1, 2019.

Olendorf will lead and oversee the services and operations of the Natural Resources Library (NRL), which provides research services, instruction, and access to collections supporting the College of Natural Resources (CNR), the Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences (MEAS), and the university community. He will work closely with faculty and students and will manage collections in forestry and environmental resources; geospatial science; and marine, earth, and atmospheric sciences in collaboration with librarians in Collections & Research Strategy. Olendorf will also design and teach specialized workshops and seminars that incorporate complex, rapidly evolving research and collaboration tools, data science and analysis, and the use of technology-rich spaces for interactive teaching and visualization.

Olendorf currently serves as Science Data Librarian at Penn State University, where he provides research data support for faculty and staff, consults on data management plans, curates data sets being ingested into the institutional repository, and works with researchers to manage and document their data. At Penn State, Olendorf has chaired a committee to develop comprehensive research data services and is the product owner of ScholarSphere, the institutional repository.

Previously Olendorf was a Solutions Architect at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he managed and was the primary developer for their Hydra-based repository, which held more than 300,000 records dating back to the Manhattan Project. He has also taught at the University of New Mexico, where he taught library resources instruction in the sciences and led the development of a metadata packaging plan for the ingestion of research data into the institutional repository.

Olendorf earned his Master of Library Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, specializing in Bioinformatics and Digital Curation. He has a PhD from Michigan State University in Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and Behavior; an MS from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in Biology; and a BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in Molecular and Cell Biology. He is a member of the Data Curation Network, the DataONE Usability Group, and the RDA Interoperability Interest Group through the Research Data Alliance.