Before graduating from SLIS in 2012, Peter Balestrieri had already spent his life in libraries. He started working at the Milwaukee Public Library when he was eighteen, shelving books for a brief time. In his twenties, he was rehired as the person in charge of processing gifts and donations, identifying rare books, and managing the subbasement. During this time, and his subsequent time working at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Peter was also working as a sculptor and musician, eventually playing saxophone with Violent Femmes for many years, and earning a Gold Record.

After leaving the band in 1990, Peter pursued a degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, graduating with Honors in English and creative writing. Following graduation in 1996, he moved to California to join his wife who was teaching at Stanford. He got a job in Circulation at Stanford’s Green Library, shelving, and shifting thousands of books from one location to another.

The couple moved to Iowa in 2001 when his wife took a position in the English department at UI. In 2009, Peter began studying in SLIS, getting hired by the college first in Book Repair, and then in Reference, before taking a SLIS course with Greg Prickman, at that time Assistant Director of Special Collections, and switching to Special Collections. Pete says that he knew from the moment that he set foot in the archive it was where he was meant to be, never having lost his love of finding rare things. After graduating from SLIS, he was brought on by Greg for two one-year appointments as a processing librarian, before hired officially in 2014 as Curator. He was asked to process Rusty Hevelin’s collection of thousands of genre fiction books and magazines, and extensive fandom materials. This sent him to the World Science Fiction Convention, where Rusty’s name introduced him to well-known collectors and authors, like Joe and Gay Haldeman. He told me that librarians really are “gamblers, always put in this position of having to guess: will this be used in the future? How will the field develop? How do I buy things now that researchers will study later?” His enthusiasm in these spaces, and lucky gambling streak, would lead to continuous large donations, and a strong relationship with the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), an organization that preserves the history of media fandoms, which allowed him to take in important collections, storing the physical materials for OTW. Neither of Peter’s current positions existed before he had them; they were made for him; his background in art prepared him for his other role as a curator of the Iowa Archives of the Avante-Garde, working with collections relating to Fluxus, Mail Art, Rubber Stamp Art, etc.

His advice to SLIS students was practical, wanting us to learn as much as we can from our classes but to remember that our future “recommenders should be your work supervisors, not your professors. Find library work while in SLIS and work at it as hard as you can.”