University Librarian

About Pat Riva

Pat Riva began her role as Interim University Librarian on September 1, 2022.

She arrived at Concordia in November 2015 as associate university librarian for collection services.

Riva has multidisciplinary training in mathematics, linguistics and library science, and more than three decades of experience in university and national libraries. Prior to Concordia, she served in different capacities at McGill University’s library, becoming a full librarian, and at Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. She also has an extensive research dossier, including 30 publications and 70 conference papers, presentations and workshops.

As well, Riva has made outstanding contributions to her field as chair or contributor of different national and international bibliographic standards committees. In Canada, Riva serves as chair or member on the national committees for metadata content and encoding standards.

Active in the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), Riva was elected to the Standing Committees of the Cataloguing Section and the Bibliography Section, as well as chair of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) Review Group. She helped lead the consolidation of the three IFLA conceptual models into a single logically consistent and streamlined one, published and approved as an official IFLA standard in 2017. The IFLA Library Reference Model is now the basis for Resource Description and Access and is Riva’s most cited publication.

She is now the secretary of the IFLA Committee on Standards.

In 2020, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries presented Riva with its Award of Merit, in recognition of her national and international accomplishments on behalf of Canadian academic libraries and universities in the development of bibliographic standards and the conceptual modelling of bibliographic information.