The Advocating for Ourselves: Working in Underrepresented and Multicultural Archives and Libraries panel highlights the importance of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) cultural heritage work. This event was supported by the Rare Book School-Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion, and Cultural Heritage and organized by the Advocacy Working Group.

Video

Speaker Bios

Lauren Cooper (she/her) is the Digital Scholarship Librarian and Managing Director for the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk at Penn State University. Lauren works with students, faculty, librarians, and partners to implement, develop, and manage digital scholarship and publishing projects that bring nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life. Lauren has a MLIS degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, with a specialization in archives and digital curation and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Redlands in Visual Sociology: Struggle and Resistance. Prior to becoming a librarian, Lauren worked in publishing and education at social justice organizations for more than 20 years to promote underrepresented voices, communities, and histories.

Jonna C. Paden (Acoma/Laguna Pueblo; she/her) is Librarian & Archivist at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center Library & Archives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she has been previously a student and a community intern. She has worked as an independent library and archives consultant. Since 2020, she has been a chair of the New Mexico Library Association’s Native American Libraries Special Interest Group (NALSIG). She holds an MLIS in Archives Studies and Records Management from San José State University and was part of the Circle of Learning cohort.

Mario H. Ramírez (he/him) is the Head of Special Collections and Archives at the California State University, Los Angeles. He received a PhD in Information Studies and a Certificate in Experimental Critical Theory from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2017. Previously, he has held appointments as Project Archivist at the Bancroft Library at the University of California Berkeley, and at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. He was a 2018–2019 CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.