The Authors

Author bios are current as of 2014. If authors have made their chapters available online, they are linked to below. There may be very minor wording/proofreading differences between those versions and what appears in the printed book.

Siân Evans (“Why Archive?” and Other Important Questions Asked by Occupiers) is a librarian and feminist. She earned an MA in Art History from the University of Western Ontario and an MSLIS from Pratt Institute. Since completing her graduate work, she has been published in The Serials Librarian and Art Documentation on issues around open access politics and art historical research. She lives in Brooklyn and works for ARTstor.

Molly Fair (Building an Archive from Below: Reflections from Interference Archive) is an archivist, activist, and artist. She is a co-founder of Interference Archive in Brooklyn, NY, a public study center and collection of materials produced by social movements. She is also a collective member of Justseeds Artists' Cooperative.

Jenna Freedman (Cutter & Paste: A DIY Guide for Catalogers Who Don't Know About Zines and Zine Librarians Who Don't Know About Cataloging) is the Associate Director of Communications and Zine Librarian at Barnard College in New York City and a former, but founding member of Radical Reference. She writes and presents on zine librarianship and other themes of library activism and publishes the zine Lower East Side Librarian.

Lia Friedman (Radical Reference: Who Cares?) is a gardener, ocean lover, and librarian based in southern California. Director of Learning Services at UCSD Library, Staff Librarian for Make/Shift magazine, and a member of Radical Reference, Lia was named a 2009 “Mover and Shaker” by Library Journal.

Taneya D. Gethers (Knowledge My Public Library Kept Secret: The Urgent Need for Culturally-Responsive Library Service) is a writer, editor, and librarian who proudly serves the community of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where she resides with her husband, Yusuf, and their three daughters. She holds a BA from Spelman College and a MSLIS from Drexel University. She believes that libraries can help transform lives and propel positive action in the world.

Dan Grace (Reading for a Better Future: Books For A Better Future (BFABF) and Sustainability Literacy in a U.K. Public Library) lives, writes and works in Sheffield, UK. He used to work in public libraries but turned to the dark side and joined the staff at Sheffield Hallam Corpora..., sorry, University in early 2013. The Books For A Better Future reading group continues to run on a monthly basis, although he has now been demoted to an ordinary member and had his cake privileges revoked. It's not all bad though, he spends half the week working on his PhD exploring ideas around community resilience, the commons and public libraries. You can read about this here. He's also a member of the Radical Librarians Collective, a UK-based network founded to challenge the neoliberal and professionalist attitudes prevalent in our workplaces and provide a space for communication and solidarity. His fave radical library so far has to be the one at the 1-in-12 club in Bradford. Nice, comfy sofas. In between the library-ing, being a dad, and other life stuff, Dan writes and has poetry and short stories published in a variety of places. You can read more about that here. He also spends too much time on Twitter being snarky.

Jen Hoyer (threeSOURCE: Reimagining How We Collect and Share Information about Social Issues) loves libraries, grey literature, and pancakes. Jen has worked in public libraries, school libraries, special libraries, and rural African villages; she currently spends as much time as possible hanging out at Interference Archive. She is passionate about equitable information access and new ways to create an information-literate society. And maple syrup.

Rhonda Kauffman (Cutter & Paste: A DIY Guide for Catalogers Who Don't Know About Zines and Zine Librarians Who Don't Know About Cataloging) is the cataloging/metadata librarian at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She first wrote a zine in the 1990s as a high school student and has just recently reentered zinedom by authoring a mamazine, Bloom.

Moyra Lang (Library Programs and Information Access for Incarcerated Women: A Canadian Perspective) is a Queer Librarian Activist. Moyra works in the area of access to information for vulnerable populations including sex trade workers, incarcerated women, and people with cognitive disabilities. Moyra focuses on creating and advocating for accessibility in all she does—accessible space, accessible information, accessible kindness. In her spare time she reads books, practices witchcraft and helps plan the revolution!

Zachary Loeb (Librarian Is My Occupation: A History of the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street) is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his BA somewhere, his MSIS somewhere else, and is pursuing an MA because he loves debt. A Reference Librarian and Occupy Librarian, he co-captains the blog LibrarianShipwreck, where he writes using the moniker The Luddbrarian.

Stephen MacDonald (threeSOURCE: Reimagining How We Collect and Share Information about Social Issues) is an information management professional in Edmonton, Alberta. He holds a Master of Library and Information Studies degree from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Stephen has a passion for social justice and is interested in ways that library workers can use their skills to bring about social change in their communities and beyond. He is also interested in initiatives designed to address poverty and homelessness.

Hannah Mermelstein (Knowledge, Access, and Resistance: A Conversation on Librarians and Archivists to Palestine) is a school librarian and Palestine solidarity activist in Brooklyn, NY. She has led 30 delegations in Palestine, including Librarians and Archivists to Palestine, and is the author of the Jerusalem Quarterly article "Overdue Books: Returning Palestine's 'Abandoned Property' of 1948."

Jessica Moran (To Spread the Revolution: Anarchist Archives and Libraries) is Assistant Digital Archivist at the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. She has worked in government, special, and university libraries and archives, everywhere from the Emma Goldman Papers at UC Berkeley, where she developed her love of anarchist history and finding anarchists in the archives, to the National Center for Science Education, where as Archives Project Director she was lucky enough to help document the organization's efforts to defend the teaching of evolution in the public schools against religious attacks, to working at the California State Archives. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley, a MLIS from San Jose State University, and an MA in History from San Francisco State University. She was the assistant editor of the first two volumes of Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years and is a member of the Kate Sharpley Library Collective. Follow her at @jessicammoran.

Melissa Morrone (Introduction) helps run Brooklyn Public Library's Info Commons. She works with Radical Reference and is a member of Librarians and Archivists to Palestine as well as other local solidarity projects. She is online at @InfAgit.

Caroline Muglia (iCommunity: Digital Media, Family Heirlooms and a Global Audience in the Lebanese in North Carolina Project) is a Data Librarian living in Washington, D.C., which allows her to be professionally curious. She received her MA in History from NC State University and MS in Library Science from UNC, Chapel Hill SILS program. She has been working with the Lebanese in North Carolina Project since 2010. A museum exhibition showcasing the family heirlooms and oral histories of the Lebanese-American community will be open until August 31, 2014, at the NC Museum of History. Stay tuned on what's happening with the Project: blog, Facebook, and Twitter.

Vani Natarajan (Knowledge, Access, and Resistance: A Conversation on Librarians and Archivists to Palestine) works as a Research and Instruction Librarian in the Humanities and Global Studies, at Barnard College Library, New York. She is also a member of Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel. She writes fiction and essays. Her interests include feminist and queer politics, the spatialization of knowledge, and independent publishing.

Anna Perricci (“Why Archive?” and Other Important Questions Asked by Occupiers) is an archivist, installation artist and educator. She earned a MSI in Archives and Records Management and a graduate teaching certificate at the University of Michigan. Since completing graduate research on the preservation of the Atari 2600 and highly ephemeral artworks, she has collaborated with artists and activists in New York City to preserve their work.

Anna is currently a Web Archiving Project Librarian at Columbia University, where she is coordinating the creation of new web archives including one that focuses on contemporary composers' websites. A poster on the effectiveness of the Human Rights Web Archive she co-created with Pamela Graham is available in Columbia University Academic Commons. She has also co-produced events in Columbia University Libraries including a time to play and learn about vintage video games, and report-backs on international travel by librarians at Barnard College and Columbia University.

Anna has worked at the New York Public Library as an Assistant Field Services Librarian and at ARTstor where she provided education, outreach, and statistical analysis. She has also been an archivist for Figment, a participatory art festival, and Occupy Wall Street, and she has consulted with other artists and activists about documentation and preservation of their work. She has completed art projects and engaged in professional collaborations in Surinam, Japan, South Africa and Russia. She earned a BA in history, a certificate in women's studies and a Post-baccalaureate certificate in sculpture at Brandeis University.

Barbara Quarton (Teaching in the Margins) is coordinator of library instruction in the John M. Pfau Library at California State University San Bernardino. Her research interests are active learning, critical information literacy, and writing across the curriculum.

Amy Roberts (“Why Archive?” and Other Important Questions Asked by Occupiers) created the Occupy Wall Street archives after being an activist for many years. Her experiences have given her insight into how archives can be a tool for activists seeking to shape their own historical narrative. She is currently finishing her Masters of Library Studies with an emphasis on archives and works at a public library in New York.

Gayle Sacuta (Library Programs and Information Access for Incarcerated Women: A Canadian Perspective) works as a library director in Drayton Valley. Gayle spends her spare time working on a collection of writing about her 1970s girlhood on an Alberta farm. Immigration, family, school, community, the mysterious landscape—all relationships are explored within a rural Alberta backdrop. She blogs at landscapes I inhabit.

Maggie Schreiner (“Less Rent, More Control!”: Creating an Accessible Archive for New York City’s Oldest Tenants Union) is a digital archivist and community organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. As an academic and an activist, she is interested in the creation of historical memory in social justice organizing. Maggie has worked on food justice issues and in solidarity with anti-colonial struggles.

Béatrice Colastin Skokan (From Haiti to Miami: Security, Serendipity, and Social Justice) is the Manuscripts Librarian at the University of Miami Libraries Special Collections. Ms. Skokan received her MLIS from Florida State University. She also holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Miami. Ms. Skokan is co-chair of the SAA Human Rights Archives Roundtable. Her research interests include the documentation of oral, immigrant, and peripheral cultures.

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz (Queer Housing Nacional Google Group: A Librarian’s Documentation of a Community-Specific Resource) started the Queer Housing Nacional email list because she wanted to disrupt the lack of attention to gentrification in communities of color by queer white folks, but possibly creating a community-specific resource for queer women of color, or those who were intentional allies. Shawn was able to do this likely because she’s been an organizer in the geographic and LGBT community since 2000, from being named the youngest executive director in the country for co-founding Sister Outsider—a non-profit for self-supporting young women in the street economies, serving Brownsville and East Flatbush, Brooklyn—while she was still in high school, to being active in women of color separatist spaces and fighting against community-based international e-campaigns that were against the existence of these spaces. Ultimately, creating resources that are community-specific is at the center of Shawn’s work.

Shawn is an archivist at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a faculty librarian at the Graduate Center of the City University New York, and co-producer of Rivers of Honey, a Cabaret highlighting the art of women of color. Her writing blends storytelling with documentation and is featured in journals and anthologies such as Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Out Behind the Desk: Workplace Issues for LGBTQ Librarians (2011), Films for the Feminist Classroom, and others. She collects stories of queer women of color turning thirty with her project Her Saturn Returns: Queer Women of Color Life Transitions, and is completing her MFA in Fiction at Queens College. She holds a BS in Queer Women's Studies from the CUNY Baccalaureate Program, and an MLS from Queens College where her thesis paper, titled, "Sources on Queer Theories for the Production of Lesbian of Color Identity Formation through Literature, Art or Documentation" can be read here. Shawn initiated Alternative Realities: Three Staged Readings by Black Lesbian Writers with her play Saturnistas. She is a 2014 Louis Armstrong House and Museum Resident. As a reference librarian at the CUNY Graduate Center, Shawn is the LGBTQ studies liaison where she gets to promote a queer library collection. You can find out more about Shawn and her work at shawntasmith.commons.gc.cuny.edu.

Jaime Taylor (Librarian Is My Occupation: A History of the People’s Library of Occupy Wall Street) lives in Brooklyn with a bratty one-eyed cat named Odin. She earned her BA at Smith College and her MLS at Simmons College, and hopes to one day be out from under the debt incurred by doing so. When not catering to Odin's every need, Jaime writes at the LibrarianShipwreck blog with Zachary Loeb and Kyle Lukoff. She was part of the Occupy Wall Street People's Library working group, and continues to provide reference services to wayward radicals as often as possible. Among this all, she somehow finds time for a day job as an art librarian at a gallery in Manhattan. She is interested in the gendered nature of librarianship, rethinking librarian education, flattening institutional structures beyond what is currently fashionable, and providing library services in unconventional settings.

Vince Teetaert (Whatcha Doin' After the Demo?: The Importance of Archiving Political Posters) lives in Montréal, Québec with his girlfriend and their two young boys. He enjoys gardening; controlled vocabularies; science experiments; and cataloging the forgotten, ignored and unappreciated. Vince is still involved with QPIRG Concordia's Political Poster Archive, working to one day have it online. His paid job is as a cataloger at Concordia University Library (Montréal).

Cynthia Tobar (Documenting the Untold Stories of Feminist Activists at Welfare Rights Initiative: A Digital Oral History Archive Project) is an archivist, oral historian, and metadata specialist who is interested in collecting stories that highlight the meaningful connections between activist groups and policy makers, creating public history projects that are freely accessible to everyone in the community. Cynthia is the founder of the WRI Oral History Project, which is documenting the Welfare Rights Initiative (WRI), a grassroots student activist and community leadership training organization located at Hunter College. An avid traveler, cinephile, and foodie, Cynthia enjoys cooking at home in Brooklyn with her son, who's an aspiring chef.

Jude Vachon (Inside and Outside of the Library: On Removing Barriers and Connecting People with Health Care Resources and Zines) is a public librarian and health care advocate. She lives in Pittsburgh with her animals.

Scott Ziegler (Let’s Use What Works: The Radical Archives of Philadelphia and Traditional Archival Literature) is an archivist in Philadelphia. When he's not too busy with his day job he writes for the Start an Archives! blog, and works with local community collections, including the Soapbox Zine Library and the Philadelphia Social Justice Archives. Scott is a founding collective member of the Radical Archives of Philadelphia (currently under restructuring).