Library - Loyola Marymount University

LMU's William H. Hannon Library

At the William H. Hannon Library, our librarians foster excellence in academic achievement at Loyola Marymount University through an array of distinctive collections and services that enable researchers and learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. We are driven by a culture of collaboration and an attention to user experience sustained by immersion in campus communities of practice.

Our four-fold vision of the William H. Hannon Library – as a bridge across disciplines, as a gateway to rich collections, as an agora for the exchange of ideas, and as an enterprise informed by best-practices – drives us toward exceptional service, collections, operations, and programming. We engage with our faculty, students, and staff in innovative ways that enable us to create the world we want to live in.

Project CORA

The William H. Hannon Library is the home of Project CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments, an award-winning open access online repository of research assignments and teaching tools for faculty and librarians, built to U.S. and international information literacy standards. Project CORA is a collaborative space for adapting and experimenting with research assignments and a place where instructors can share classroom successes and lessons learned.

Course Adopted Texts (CATS) E-book Initiative

Students looking at a computer screen inside library

CATS is a library initiative to help reduce student spending on textbooks by cross-referencing all faculty course-adopted text lists with multi-user e-books in our collections or available for institutional purchase. We work one-on-one with faculty to maximize accessibility to course materials wherever possible by utilizing the expertise of our librarians and the richness of collections.

Archives and Special Collections Faculty Collaborations

Student examining object with magnifying glass

At the William H. Hannon Library, we value faculty engagement and encourage student participation in our instructional decisions through curation and course design. We partner with faculty to design hands-on experiences for students to learn with rare books and archival materials through experiences such as class-curated pop-up exhibits, archives-based "escape rooms", and student conservation projects.

Meet the Dean

Kristine Brancolini, Dean of the Library

Kristine Brancolini is the dean of the Library, a position she has held since 2006. She arrived at Loyola Marymount University just as the planning began for a new library, which was an exciting opportunity for both library staff and the entire university. The William H. Hannon Library opened in the summer of 2009 and has since been the hub of intellectual and cultural activity on campus.

Dean Brancolini is committed to creating a user-centered library — an environment that honors the past but embraces the future by providing exemplary library services and access to outstanding collections in all formats. She leads an innovative and accomplished team of librarians and library staff members who help provide direct research and learning support to faculty and students.

Dean Brancolini has published widely in the field of library and information science, including media librarianship and digital library development. Her current research focuses on research success factors academic and research librarians. With her research partners, she studies the development of research skills and productivity, research self-efficacy, and research networks. She is co-director of the Institute for Research Design in Librarianship (IRDL), which was federally funded for six years (2013-2019) to train and support academic and research librarians who are novice researchers. Assessment has shown the program to be effective in fostering research confidence and productivity among participants. In summer 2020 the IRDL will be offered for the first time using a self-funding model.