UCLA

MLIS coursework

Completed Coursework: Digital Asset Management; Archival Description and Access Systems; Metadata; Digital Preservation; Intro to Digital Humanities; Oral History for Social Change; Community-Based Archives; Museums in the Digital Age; Archives, Records, and Memory; Artifacts and Cultures; User Experience Design; Values and Communities in Information Professions; Information Systems and Infrastructures; Description and Access

 

  • Introduction to Digital Humanities (DH201), Dr. Miriam Posner, Winter 2021

    • Dying Behind Bars: Beyond the Data is a digital humanities project based on research made public by Reuters at the end of 2020 documenting deaths in U.S. local jails from 2008–2019. The Dying Behind Bars project specifically focuses on female deaths in California jails. The purpose of this project is twofold: 1) to critically analyze and understand what this data says and what it doesn't say, and 2) to instill in the viewer the necessary reminder that these are human beings who deserve to be remembered as more than a statistic or data point.

  • Community-Based Archives (IS433), Dr. Michelle Caswell, Spring 2021

    • Finding Aid for a collection at the Skid Row History Museum & Archive (Los Angeles Poverty Department). The collection consists of 400+ items related to homelessness in Los Angeles including newspaper clippings, letters, flyers, maps, L.A. city reports, and other documents. Working closely with the organization’s archivist, I created a list of search terms based on the collection’s scope and content. In addition to the search terms, the finding aid includes a history, description, container structure, and item-level container list for the collection.

  • Archival Description and Access Systems (IS438B), Dr. Jonathan Furner, Winter 2021

    • Finding Aid for a fictitious set of archival resources. Created using ArchivesSpace, it is ISAD(G) and DACS-compliant and encoded in EAD format.

    • Final Paper – “Recentering Indigenous Epistemologies and Ontologies in the Archives: Toward Participatory Description.” This paper provides historical context of the colonial erasure and silencing of Indigenous voices and worldviews in the archives and demonstrates how descriptive standards have historically been incompatible with the dynamic nature of Indigenous knowledge. The paper argues that efforts to combat erasure and silencing in the archives must adopt a decolonization methodology by centering Indigenous communities’ worldviews, voices, knowledge, and preservation needs; participatory archival description offers a step forward as we collectively work towards enacting more just and liberatory futures inside and outside of the archives.

  • Systems and Infrastructures (IS270), Dr. Jean-François Blanchette, Winter 2021

    • Policy Brief addressed to UCLA campus leaders highlighting key issues and challenges around a hypothetical incorporation and adoption of audio streaming services within campus libraries.

  • Digital Preservation (IS241), Dr. Anne Gilliland, Winter 2021

    • Online Instructional Module – “Digital Preservation and Your Latinx Community” was created in collaboration with Madison Juul and Enrique Olivares Pesante. Drawing on the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) conceptual model, the module outlines introductory step-by-step instructions on community-based archiving and digital preservation processes for a Puerto Rican community in Los Angeles.

  • Metadata (IS464), Melissa Gill, Spring 2021

    • Metadata Strategy for hypothetical service provider and digital aggregator of multiple Los Angeles mural photography collections. “Metadata Strategy for L.A. on the Wall: A Digital Aggregator of Mural Photography” outlines the various metadata considerations for this aggregator including the scope of the collection and repository, a use case, search and browse functionalities, a data model, resource description issues, recommended vocabularies, metadata schema and a sample record, rights metadata, crowdsourcing options, and future considerations.

  • Values and Communities in Information Professions (IS212), Dr. Safiya Noble, Spring 2021

    • Podcast created in collaboration with Hannah Whelan titled Finding Signs of Life: An Analysis of Subterranean Archives, which explores critical issues within the field of library and information studies. With a particular focus on archival theory and praxis, the conversation draws on theoretical frameworks to unpack themes of racial formation; European hegemony; white normativity; neoliberalism and various political projects designed to concentrate wealth, power, control, and authority; state and bureaucratic control of memory; the illusion of neutrality in cultural heritage institutions; and expanding notions of ‘evidence’ within archives through counternarratives. This is all done in the interest of exploring how we can best envision and enact liberatory futures inside archives (and the IS field) and throughout our society.

  • Archives, Records, and Memory (IS431), Dr. Mario Ramirez, Fall 2020

    • Voices, Visuals, and Our COVID-19 Experiences: A Participatory Digital Archive of 2020 is a digital archive consisting of voice recordings and images created by friends and family members documenting their experiences in 2020. While the project for the course only involved the collection phase of these materials, I am currently building the digital archive on Omeka for public access, taking into consideration the privacy of each donor and the sensitive subject matter of the records.