Robert L. Maxwell

Robert L. Maxwell is a Senior Librarian at the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, where he has chaired the Special Collections and Formats Catalog Department. He is the author of Maxwell’s Handbook for RDA (ALA Editions, 2013), which won the 2014 ABC-CLIO Award for Best Book in Library Literature and the ALCTS 2015 Outstanding Publication Award. He also won the ALA Highsmith Library Literature Award for 2002 for the book Maxwell’s Guide to Authority Work (ALA Editions, 2002) and is the author of a number of other books on cataloging published by the American Library Association. He has taught cataloging at Brigham Young University and the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science and has chaired the Bibliographic Standards Committee of the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). He has been a voting member of the ALCTS Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access, the body responsible for developing official ALA positions on additions to and revisions of RDA, and currently is the liaison between that committee and ALA’s Subject Analysis Committee. In addition to an M.L.S. from the University of Arizona, he holds a J.D. from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. in classical languages and literatures from the University of Toronto. Maxwell was awarded the 2024 Margaret Mann Citation, sponsored by OCLC and Core: Leadership, Infrastructure, Futures.