Volunteer projects
Current: Wikipedia editing
I am a passionate Wikipedian and frequently collaborate to help produce edit-a-thons and other projects focused on creating visibility for underrepresented people, places, and histories on Wikipedia. I’ll be very happy to help with your edit-a-thon event if my schedule allows. Feel free to contact me at monica.e.westin (at) gmail.com. (My favorite Wikipedia article I’ve created is about María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, who founded the public library system in Cuba.)
Past: Library of Congress
From 2020 to 2022 I led the training and coordinated the work of dozens of Library of Congress volunteers and interns to add metadata enabling historical bills to be linked on congress.gov.
Past: You Promised Us
From 2020 to 2021 I assisted the artists behind You Promised Us by adding preservation links (courtesy of the Internet Archive) to their database, as they worked to document, archive, and categorize the public statements of corporations in response to the 2020 movement for Black Lives.
Past: Prelinger Library
From 2018 to 2020 I was a regular Saturday host at the Library, where I had previously been a writer in residence during 2018. Information about the library, including the collection and open hours, at prelingerlibrary.org
Past: Museum Accessibility at FAMSF
From 2016 to 2019 I was a regular volunteer in the Access Department at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where I regularly facilitated Access Days at both museums. I cannot recommend this experience highly enough to anyone living in the Bay Area who is interested in solving accessibility problems at cultural institutions. In this role I was also able to assist with Beam tours for homebound visitors, which triggered my ongoing interest in telepresence technologies (and their limitations) for solving access problems.
I wrote about the Beam and reframing disability as a design problem for SFMOMA’s Open Space platform.