2020 DLF Forum Community Journalists
Meet our Community Journalists
The 2020 Virtual DLF Forum looks different from our typical event in almost every way imaginable. Due to the fact that we aren’t convening in person and registration is free, we decided to offer a different kind of fellowship opportunity. Because the guiding purpose of this year’s Virtual DLF Forum is building community while apart, through our re-envisioned fellowship program, we are highlighting new voices from “community journalists” in the field. We are providing $250 stipends to a cohort of 10 Virtual DLF Forum attendees from a variety of backgrounds and will feature their voices and experiences on the DLF blog after our events this fall.
We are excited to announce this year’s DLF Forum Community Journalists:
Arabeth Balasko (she/her) is an archivist and historian dedicated to public service and proactive stewardship. As a professional archivist, her overarching goals are to curate collections that follow a shared standardization practice, are user-centric, and are searchable and accessible to all via physical and digital platforms.
She believes that an archive should be a welcoming place for all people and should be an inclusive environment which advocates to collect, preserve, and make accessible the stories and histories of diverse voices. By getting individuals involved in telling THEIR story and making THEIR history part of the ever-growing story of humanity, we all win!
Rebecca Y. Bayeck is a dual-PhD holder in Learning Design & Technology and Comparative & International Education from the Pennsylvania State University. Currently a CLIR postdoctoral fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where she engages in digital research, data curation, and inclusive design. Her interdisciplinary research is at the interface of several fields including the learning sciences, literacy studies, and game studies. At this intersection, she explores literacies and learning in games, particularly board games, the interaction of culture, space, and context on design, learning, research, literacies.
Shelly Black is the Cyma Rubin Library Fellow at North Carolina State University Libraries where she supports digital preservation in the Special Collections Research Center. She also works on a strategic project involving immersive technology spaces and digital scholarship workflows. Previously she was a marketing specialist at the University of Arizona Libraries and promoted library services and programs through social media, news stories, and newsletters.
Shelly was recently selected as a 2020 Emerging Leader by the American Library Association and is a provisional member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. She received a MLIS and a Certificate in Archival Studies from the University of Arizona where she was a Knowledge River scholar. She also holds a BFA in photography and minor in Japanese from the UA.
Lisa Covington, MA is a PhD Candidate at The University of Iowa studying Sociology of Education, Digital Humanities and African American Studies. Her dissertation work is “Mediating Black Girlhood: A Multi-level Comparative Analysis of Narrative Feature Films.” This research identifies mechanisms in which media operates as an institution, (mis)informing individual and social ontological knowledge.
In 2020, Lisa received the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the Iowa Department of Human Rights. She is the Director of the Ethnic Studies Leadership Academy in Iowa City, an educational leadership program for Black youth, in middle school and high school, to learn African American advocacy through incorporating digital humanities and social sciences.
Lisa received her MA from San Diego State University in Women & Gender Studies. As a youth development professional, Lisa develops curriculum for weekly programming with girls of color, trains teachers on best practices for working with underrepresented youth, and directs programs in preschool through college settings in California, Pennsylvania, Iowa, New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C.
Ana Hilda Figueroa de Jesús will be graduating next spring from the Universidad de Puerto Rico in Río Piedras with a BA in History of Art. Her research interest focuses on education, accessibility and publicity of minority, revolutionary Puerto Rican art including topics such as race, gender and transnationalism. She has interned at Visión Doble: Journal of Criticism and History of Art, and volunteered at MECA International Art Fair 2019 and Instituto Nueva Escuela. Ana works as assistant for the curator and director of the Museum of History, Anthropology and Art at UPR. She is currently a Katzenberger Art History Intern at Smithsonian Libraries.
Amanda Guzman is an anthropological archaeologist with a PhD in Anthropology (Archaeology) from the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in the field of museum anthropology with a research focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of issues of intercultural representation and national identity formation. She applies her collections experience as well as her commitment to working with and for multiple publics to her object-based inquiry teaching practice that privileges a more equitable, co-production of knowledge in the classroom through accessible engagement in cultural work. Amanda is currently the Ann Plato Post-Doctoral Fellow in Anthropology and American Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.
Carolina Hernandez is currently an Instruction Librarian at the University of Houston where she collaborates on creating inclusive learning environments for students. Previously, she was the Journalism Librarian at the University of Oregon, where she co-managed the Oregon Digital Newspaper Program. Her MLIS is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her current research interests are in critical information literacy, inclusive pedagogy, and most recently, the intersection of digital collections and pedagogy.
Jocelyn Hurtado is a native Miamian who worked as an Archivist at a community repository for four year. She is experienced in working with manuscript, art and artifact collections pertaining to a community of color whose history has often been overlooked. Ms. Hurtado, understands the responsibility and the significance of the work done by community archivists and has seen firsthand that this work not only affects the present-day community but that it will continue to have a deep-rooted impact on generations to come.
Ms. Hurtado also has experience promoting collections through exhibits, presentations, instructional sessions, and other outreach activities which includes the development and execution of an informative historical web-series video podcast.
Ms. Hurtado earned her Associate Degree in Anthropology from Miami-Dade College and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from the University of Florida. She also completed the Georgia Archives Institute Program.
Melde Rutledge is the Digital Collections Librarian at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library. He is responsible for leading the library’s digitization services—primarily in support of ZSR’s Special Collections and Archives, as well as providing support for university departments.
He earned his MLIS from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has served in librarianship for approximately 12 years. His background also includes 8 years of newspaper journalism, where he wrote news, sports, and feature articles for several locally published newspapers in North Carolina.
He currently lives in Winston-Salem, NC, with his wife and three sons.
Hsiu-Ann Tom is the Digital Archivist at The Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, LA where her work focuses on born digital collection development. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University in Boston in 2019. She is a graduate of Columbia University (BA, Sociology) and Harvard University (MA, Religion and Politics), and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. Prior to working in the archival field, Hsiu-Ann served in the United States Army intelligence field as a cryptolinguistic analyst, attending the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Before coming to Amistad, Hsiu-Ann worked on the archives staff of Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center working with the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts Collection. She recently obtained the Society of American Archivist Digital Archivist Specialist certification and enjoys supporting students and new professionals in their educational development through her work as a member of SAA’s Graduate Archival Education Committee.
In his previous work, Kevin served as project manager for the Andrew W. Mellon funded African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities, where he produced project events and other scholarly activities, making the digital humanities more inclusive of African American scholarship while enriching African American studies research with new methods, archives, and tools. Kevin also served as project manager for Baltimore Stories: Narratives and Life of an American City, funded by the NEH Humanities in the Public Square grant in partnership with Maryland Humanities, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Enoch Pratt Free Library, and the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance.
Betsy Yoon (she/they) is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and OER/Reference Librarian at the College of Staten Island, CUNY and earned her MLIS in 2019. She also has a Master of International Affairs. She lives in occupied Lenapehoking and is a longtime member of Nodutdol, a grassroots organization of diasporic Koreans and comrades working to advance peace, decolonization, and self-determination on the Korean Peninsula and Turtle Island (North America). Interests include critical approaches to OER and openness, the free/libre software movement, understanding and addressing root causes over symptom management, and the role that libraries and archives can play in our collective liberation.