Ana Roeschley is Assistant Professor and Director of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Science at the University of North Texas. She is the Director of the Our Refugee Stories Archive, a community-based archival initiative to create digital collections for and by refugees, as well as openly available resources on best practices for archiving personal records for personal use.
Roeschley is the founder and Co-Director of two research labs: the Archives Learning Lab—dedicated to investigating the relationships between people and archives in an ever-changing world; and the Computational Humanities and Information Literacy Lab—an interdisciplinary lab focused on the exploration of social and technological issues impacting human culture, heritage, and the arts and humanities. Her overall scholarship focus is centered on applied research that can result in improved archival and information services to under-served individuals and communities.
Her research on personal and participatory archiving practices, as well as her own experiences as a refugee, led Roeschley to her role as the Principal Investigator of the IMLS-supported, Records of Refuge: Supporting Refugee Communities’ Archival Needs (RoR)., and applied research study aiming to close gaps on the documentary and archival needs of refugees in the United States. She is also a co-PI on the IMLS-funded, Inclusive Services to Enhance Immigrants' Resilience to Natural Disasters, and the NEH-supported, Advancing Resources for Cultural Heritage, Inclusion, and Visibility for ALL Communities — Minority-Serving Institutions.
As an archival educator and mentor, Roeschley’s focus is on meeting the needs of all of her students to ensure that they can become leaders in the archives and wider LIS fields. As co-PI on Stewarding Cultural Heritage: Latino Art, Museums and Preservation Fellowship (LAMP), a project supported by the American Latino Museum Internship and Fellowship Initiative from IMLS, Roeschley developed UNT’s Cultural Heritage Stewardship Graduate Academic Certificate program. This certificate program provides students with key skills needed for competitive careers in museum archives and other cultural heritage settings through hands-on learning experiences in grant writing, museum education, preservation, and museum archiving.
Previously, she was Assistant Professor of Professional Practice in the School of Library & Information Science at Louisiana State University. Before beginning her academic career, Roeschley worked in the Downs-Jones Library and Archives at Huston-Tillotson University. Her previous research has been published in a number of venues including in Journal of Documentation, Library and Information Science Research, Archival Science, American Archivist, and Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.