Lola L. Szladits

Lola L. Szladits (1923–1990) was an American librarian. She was the curator of New York Public Library's Berg Collection of English and American Literature for twenty years.

Career Szladits went to work for the NYPL in 1955, and was named curator of the Berg Collection in 1969. As a curator, Szladits emphasized the Berg as a living research collection, rather than a museum. She greatly expanded the collection's manuscript holdings, collecting the notebooks and diaries, as well as published works and correspondence, of many modern authors. In a book on the Bloomsbury Group, Regina Marler describes her as a "fierce... guardian" of Virginia Woolf's papers, and relates an anecdote from scholar Ellen Hawkes, who recalls Szladits as "pushing and pulling the fans, opening the roof vents for more air, and even crawling into the attic to inspect the pipes" during a New York heat wave.

Szladits was a member of the Grolier Club, and served several terms on their Library Committee. She was also a member of the Hroswitha Club. She sat on the Board of the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and was a member of many library organizations, including the Library Council of the Rosenbach Foundation, the Council of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the Friends of the Columbia Libraries, and Council of the Friends of the Princeton University Library. She was the first librarian to be profiled in the New Yorker. Later, she undertook post-graduate work at The Sorbonne, University College London (from which she received a diploma in librarianship), and Columbia University.

Her husband Charles was a professor of law at Columbia University, known for Szladits' Bibliography on Foreign and Comparative Law; he died in 1986. Lola Szladits died at her home in Manhattan on 30 March 1990.