Librarian in the Sky with Chocolate

I am a librarian, metadata specialist, and advocate for digital equity, archival justice, and sustainable information futures. I hold a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) and a Master of Science in Informatics (MS) from San José State University, with concentrations in digital preservation and the ethics of artificial intelligence in educational and archival contexts. I also hold a BA in English from Loyola Marymount University, where I first developed a passion for storytelling and for amplifying voices historically excluded from dominant narratives.

Through my doctoral research at the University of Alabama, I aim to contribute to an emerging discourse that links sustainability, metadata justice, and AI ethics within frameworks of diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism. By aligning evidence-based evaluation with critical social and environmental frameworks, I seek to articulate how libraries can lead the transition toward sustainable, equitable, and transparent information infrastructures that advance public good, community empowerment, and policy accountability.

I take a qualitative, community-centered approach to exploring how information systems can become more inclusive, ethical, and representative of the communities they serve. My experience spans roles as a digital librarian developing open-access collections, a communications assistant for UC Merced Library’s California Agricultural Resources Archive (CARA), and a co-project manager for Reading Nation Waterfall, where I helped expand access to librarian-curated, culturally sustaining books for children in Native American communities. Across these projects, I focus on embedding equity, reciprocity, and sustainability into librarianship and archival practice.

My path to librarianship is also rooted in chocolate. In Costa Rica, while recovering from a road accident amidst a rainforest of cacao trees, I became fascinated by the medicinal and communal effects of cacao, which led me to the Bribri, an Indigenous community in Talamanca for whom cacao is sacred and central to knowledge transmission and ecological balance. As a matrilineal society, Bribri women preserve cultural identity through stewardship of the land, cultivating cacao “from tree to bean to bar” while safeguarding traditions passed down through generations (Rodríguez Valencia, 2020). Their relational ethics—rooted in care, reciprocity, and respect for the environment—deeply shaped how I conceptualize sustainability as an information ethic.

Inspired by the Bribri and other Indigenous knowledge systems, I began studying how communities document, preserve, and protect their epistemologies amid global pressures of colonial data extraction, climate change, and digital inequity. These commitments now inform my work as both a librarian and a researcher: developing open-access collections, assessing library value and impact, and shaping institutional policies that center equity, accessibility, and accountability.

In my teaching and research, I draw from Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, Bharat Mehra’s community-driven information work, and Michelle Caswell’s feminist archival ethics, seeing libraries as civic and communal spaces where knowledge can empower, sustain, and heal. My current work explores how language, technology, and cultural memory intersect, and how libraries, archives, and community-based information systems can advance social and environmental justice.