MSLIS Portfolio — Xavi's Portfolio

Upcoming

10.2024 Lecture, 2024 LD4 Conference: Building Community for Linked Open Data

Previously

06.2024 Lecture, Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium

10.2021 Assistant Editor, Return to the Field

10.2021 Assistant Editor, Carmelina: Figures

05.2021 Video Editor, Light Shows

Relevant Work

Material Lab
Rhizome
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Paula Cooper Gallery
Museum of Sex
Artbook @ MoMA PS1
White Columns
Wendy's Subway
3 Hole Press
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago Cultural Center | Goat Island Archive
Society for Contemporary Art | Art Institute of Chicago

Community Links

Queer Metadata Collective
Interference Archive
Kalliopi Mathios
Madeline Mendell
B.M. Watson
Librarians on Are.na
NYPL Jail & Prison Services
Prison Library Support Network

I am a current graduate student at Pratt Institute, pursuing an MSLIS in Library and Information Science, with an Advanced Certificate in Archives. As an information professional, my primary focus has been on organizing physical and digital materials centered in contemporary art, performance, gender, and sexuality. Additionally, my work is informed by experiences as a bookseller, poetry editor, interdisciplinary writer, and DIY organizer.

Shape Expressions for Rhizome’s ArtBase

Rhizome, an incubator for born-digital art and commissions, has a long history of stewarding new avenues of digital preservation. Specifically, Rhizome’s ArtBase marked one of the first instances of an independent organization using Wikibase as a collections database which, “makes it possible to express, discover, and connect heterogeneous data across multiple, distributed digital repositories.” Likewise, my work at Rhizome has hinged on writing and researching Shape Expressions (ShEx) to aid in validating and refining information in the organization’s digital archive. This project has involved adapting a plain text, metadata application profile to machine-readable ShEx documents to navigate and correct possible errors. Additionally, this project has involved community engagement, with immense support from leading researchers including Dragan Epenschied, Kat Thornton, Andra Waagmeester, and Jose Emilio Labra Gayo, amongst others, as implementation is still in-progress. A review of this progress will be presented at the 2024 LD4 Conference: Building Community for Linked Open Data.

Reference Service to Incarcerated People

As part of INFO 652-01 Reference and Instruction, this project involved working with the New York Library Jail and Prison Services program to answer reference requests the service receives by mail each week from incarcerated library patrons. As a student reference librarian, this assignment requires a thorough understanding of library resources, reference services best practices, and the ACRL frameworks. Additionally, this assignment encourages students to develop a deeper understanding of the carceral system in the United States, and how the legal system limits information access and usage to incarcerated individuals.

QuickDraw: A Digital Preservation Case Study

During my time as an Assistant Image Archivist at Paula Cooper Gallery, I came across an unusual folder of images with confusing metadata that were impossible to open in preview and Adobe programs. I soon discovered that this batch of over 100 images were QuickDraw files, an outdated file type that is no longer supported by most programs. Although many of these images had duplicate copies in the physical image archive, rather than spending hours redigitizing these works, I thought it might be a nice project to convert these files programmatically for my Digital Preservation & Curation class at Pratt. By using ImageMagick and Exiftool, I was not only able to convert these files, but also draw compaisons between each digital entity to discover what is potentially lost during the transformation process.

Sex Archives & Linked Data

This project, which was first researched during my INFO 653-02 Knowledge Organization class, and later presented at the Gender and Sexuality in Information Science Colloquium, examines the possibilities of Linked Data for Sex Archives. Although sex archives have existing access concerns to maintain the safety of their subjects, amid the changing landscape of archival work and knowledge sharing, this research attempts to explore whether linked data can lead to communal organizing between information professionals and better representations of search queries. By analyzing online databases from the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection, The Leather Archives & Museum, and The Kinsey Institute, I aimed to propose an ethical framework for linked data both for shared use.