Current Projects

Records of Refuge: Supporting Refugee Communities’ Archival Needs

Records of Refuge is a multi-pronged archival and information science initiative seeking to meet the information and documentation needs of refugees. Informed by our experiences and training as archival and information scholars who belong to refugee, immigrant, and US-born communities, we hope to use this project to rectify a relative lack of LIS literature on the documentation-related information needs of refugees and a relative lack of refugee voices in LIS spaces. In doing so, we seek to work alongside and with refugees while centering their voices and agency in our research into how information challenges affect refugee’ documentary burdens, how information challenges are mitigated, and how the LIS field can help meet the information needs of refugees and refugee service workers,

Our Refugee Stories Archive (ORSA)

Personal documents and the stories we pass down act as our connections to both the past and to ourselves. Each refugee’s story is a testament to resilience and we are working to create a tapestry of our stories. We believe that storytelling is a means of empathy building—providing opportunities for understanding and common ground between refugees and their new neighbors. Our Refugee Stories Archives (ORSA) is envisioned as a community-based archival resource that is open to all refugees in the United States. ORSA is a growing community archive, education initiative, and research collective. Drawing on models of radical hospitality in archival contexts, we are building ORSA Academy, a freely available, scenario-based curriculum adapted from interdisciplinary archival education models to teach personal digital archiving, community collection building, and the safe use of AI for vital information seeking.

Mapping Information Austerity

Democratic life depends on an information infrastructure that allows people to access accurate information, evaluate evidence, and participate meaningfully in public life. That infrastructure is under sustained pressure. Through a program of research on information austerity, this project investigates the conditions under which equitable access to information is systematically eroded, and what library and information science professionals, educators, and communities can do in response.

Information austerity arises from the convergence of three reinforcing governance failures: fiscal austerity that defunds libraries and eliminates information professionals; deregulation that allows platforms to profit from misinformation without accountability; and ideological governance that restricts what information communities can access on partisan grounds. Together, these forces produce an engineered scarcity that, as with most austerity, distributes its costs most harshly onto communities already underserved by information institutions. This research examines how information austerity manifests across local, national, and global contexts; how it shapes the information-seeking experiences of marginalized populations, including of displaced people; and how it intersects with the proliferation of AI-generated content and algorithmic misinformation.

Selected Publications

Roeschley, A., Rocca, S., Khader, D., Klein, K., Frederick, M., Brown, N., Braga, D., Rendon Cuevas, H., Afemon, B., & Alizai, K. (In Press). Googling Bobby Sands: Information Austerity and the Collapse of the Library and Information Science Age. The Library Quarterly.

Roeschley, A., Alizai, K., Tharayil, C., Lanier, A., Frederick, M. D., & Cuevas, H. R. (2026). An archival responsibility: A scoping review of literature regarding the documentary burdens of refugees. Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, 13(1). https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol13/iss1/5

Brown, N., & Roeschley, A. (2026). Archival collections for the people? Using survey experiments to understand public opinions regarding archival services. Reference Services Review, 54(2). 121–138. https://doi.org/10.1108/RSR-08-2025-0062

Roeschley, A., Miller, J., Nikitopoulos, A., Gieringer, M.D., & Holden, J. (2024). Archiving difficult realities: A systematic investigation of records related to sexual violence in U.S. college and university archives. Archival Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-024-09434-0 

Kim, J., Roeschley, A., & Byun, M. (2024). Building bridges, preserving voices: Key factors in community oral history stewardship. Journal of Documentation. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2023-0247 

Roeschley, A. (2023). Symbiosis or friction: Understanding participant motivations for information sharing and institutional goals in participatory archive initiatives. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006231154912 

Roeschley, A. (2023). “They care enough to document people's stories”: Using ethnographic methods to understand collection day outreach events in participatory archives. Library and Information Science Research, 45(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2023.101234  

Holden, J. & Roeschley, A. (2020). Privacy and Access in the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Records. The American Archivist, 83(1), 77-90. 

Benoit, E., III. & Roeschley, A. (2019). Degrees of mediation: A review of the intersectionality between community and participatory archives. In E. Benoit, III. & A. Eveleigh, (Eds.) Participatory Archives: Theory & Practice (pp. 159-171). London: Facet Publishing.

Roeschley, A. & Kim, J. (2019). “Something that feels like a community”: The role of personal stories in building community-based participatory archives. Archival Science, 19(1), 27-49. https://doi:10.1007/s10502-019-09302-2