COVID-19: The Caribbean and Latin American Information Professionals and Academic Library Directors Speak!

Micaela Alicia Chávez Villa, Paulette Kerr, Ana María Salazar, Sueli Mara Ferreira, Ana Maria Talavera, and Liladhar Pendse

September 17, 2020

COVID-19: Caribbean and Latin American Information Pros and Academic Library Directors Speak!

Event Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the way academic libraries and archives have traditionally worked by limiting access to physical collections. In the Caribbean and Latin America, the lack of access to materials such as books, periodicals, and ephemera has been felt acutely. The intense economic, social, and political pressures in these regions have forced some regional governments to provide less attention to issues of education.

Many recent webinars have given rank librarians an opportunity to discuss the challenges of securing access to materials and providing instruction to students, scholars, and faculty. But among library administrators and information professionals, these conversations have largely been dominated by men. This panel tries to correct this aberration by providing a venue for female library directors and information studies faculty to offer their perspectives on the pandemic’s effects on the institutions they manage.

The speakers will unpack the challenges they have faced in their efforts to sustain services and provide access to materials at their institutions. They will interrogate some of the strategies they are leveraging to move forward and onward in their respective domains of expertise.

This virtual panel is part of a six-part, bi-monthly webinar series, “Collecting Conversations: Academic Libraries and Research in Flux,” which is dedicated to various aspects of librarianship. These activities will feature librarians, archivists, scholars, administrators, and vendors from all parts of the world.

Speakers

Micaela Alicia Chávez Villa Directora, Biblioteca Daniel Cosió Villegas, El Colegio de México, CDMX, México

Paulette Kerr Campus Librarian, The University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Ana María Salazar Vázquez Directora General de Bibliotecas Universidad Veracruzana, Veracruz, México

Sueli Mara Ferreira Professor, Graduate Program in Information Science at the University of São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil

Moderator: Ana Maria Talavera Ibarra Department of Humanities - Information Sciences Section, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Perú

Cosponsors

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the UC Berkeley Library