Dr. Amal Kchour is a Professor at the Faculty of Information and the Head of the Department of Library and Information Sciences / Data Sciences at the Lebanese University. She also lectures at the University of Arts and Sciences in Lebanon. Dr. Kchour holds a Ph.D. in Media and Communication Sciences from the Doctoral Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lebanese University, as well as a Master’s degree in Information and Library Management from the Lebanese University.

Basma Chebani: Associate University Librarian for Cataloging and Metadata Services, American University of Beirut Libraries, has had long experience in implementing library systems and automating the library catalog, beginning with the MARC 21 format, introducing RDA, and adapting the Dublin core format for the libraries’ digital collections. Basma is involved in most digitization projects at the University Libraries: Arabic Collections Online, from 2012; Building up the Palestinian Oral History Thesaurus (POHA), from 2014; and Al Adab Magazine Archives, 2014-2017.

Dr. Hanine Shehadeh is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities at NY Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on the intersections between settler colonialism, climate change, and new media. She is deconstructing the global framing of climate change and environmental justice, exploring how these issues are intricately tied to the settler-colonial reality in Palestine. Her academic work interrogates how new media landscapes can reinforce or resist digital colonialism, particularly in relation to indigenous identities and colonial subjugation. She contributes to a collaborative project with the Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences at AUB, examining the dynamics of settler colonialism and its socio-political implications. Dr. Shehadeh earned her Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Her dissertation, which explored the historical construction of the "dishonorable Jew" in European Christian antisemitism and Zionism, was nominated for Columbia University's Salo and Jeanette Baron Prize in Jewish Studies. She is also a recipient of Columbia University's Humanities War and Peace Initiative award for her work on affect formation in settler-colonial societies.

Dr. Jamila Ghaddar is a Lebanese feminist, archivist, historian, and educator. She is Assistant Professor in Archival Information & Digital Humanities at the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam, and Founding Director of the Archives & Digital Media Lab (ADML). She is Chair of the Middle East Librarians Association’s Archives & Records Management Training & Advocacy Group; a member of the Association of Canadian Archivists’ Indigenous Matters Committee; co-convenor of Documentary Nakba: A Reading Group for Archival Liberation in & beyond Palestine; and co-host of Archives & Heritage in Palestine. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Raymond Frogner at the National Center for Truth & Reconciliation and Dr. Greg Bak at the History Dept. at the University of Manitoba. Her publications appear in Archival Science; Library Quarterly; Archivaria; Displaced Archival Heritage (2023, Routledge); Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research (2024, SAGE); Briarpatch; Al-Akhbar. Ghaddar has led and collaborated on archival initiatives and information projects in sites around the world, including at AUB’s Jafet Library archiving the personal papers of the Arab intellectual who coined the term “Nakba”, Dr. Constantine Zurayk; and at the Centre of Memory in Johannesburg preserving the papers of the antiapartheid hero, Nelson Mandela.

Dr. Rami Zurayk is currently a Professor of Ecosystem Management at the Maroun Semaan Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at the American University of Beirut. Dr. Zurayk served as Interim Director at the Palestine Land Studies Center at the American University of Beirut (2022-2024). During his tenure, he worked on significant projects, including the Fighting Erasure initiative. Beyond regional initiatives, he has global influence as a member of the Steering Committee of the High-Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition of the Committee on World Food Security. He also served as a commissioner on the EAT-Lancet Commission on sustainable diets from sustainable food systems. He currently advises the National Convener for Food Systems in Lebanon. Dr. Zurayk has a considerable body of work and publications focused on the Arab World, particularly examining the political ecology of Arab food security focusing on its spatial dimension. He has published extensively on food security, including works on Gaza and on "Farming Palestine for Freedom" as well as extensively on issues pertaining to land use, food security and sovereignty, sustainable agriculture, and water and food systems during conflict. For two years, he was the lead researcher on the UN-HABITAT program on Land and Conflict in the Arab Region. He is a founding member of the Arab Food Sovereignty Network, which focuses on issues of food sovereignty in the Arab World, and is a contributor to Al Shabaka, the Palestine Policy Network.

Dr. Abdul Latif Zaki Abu Hashim is a historian, intellectual, and researcher in Arab-Islamic heritage, particularly the history of southern Palestine. He is Director General of the Eyes on Heritage Foundation. Dr. Abu Hashim has authored many books, research papers, and publications, including Ithaf Al-Azza in the History of Gaza (Study and Verification), The Book of Historical Mosques in Gaza City, The Diwan of Ibn Zaqaa (Study and Verification), and The Catalog of Manuscripts of the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza. His latest book, Ottoman Gaza, includes the records of the Ottoman Court of Gaza during the Ottoman period. It is considered an important source for the history of Gaza. He verified this book after obtaining a copy from the Damascus Library, a process that took four years, making it a testament to the history of Ottoman Gaza during that period. In addition to these, he has numerous peer-reviewed scientific research papers and both published and unpublished articles.

Dr. Mona Akanan holds a PhD in Media Studies from the Doctoral School Of Humanities, Literature and Social Sciences at the Lebanese University. She also holds a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Information and Library Management, as well as a second Bachelor's degree in Journalism from the Faculty of Media at the Lebanese University. In addition, she earned a Diploma in Education from Saint Joseph University in Beirut. She is a lecturer at the Faculty of Information at the Lebanese University. She is also a producer of radio investigative reports and has received two gold awards and a certificate of appreciation from the Cairo Radio and Television Festival for her programs "A World Without Paper" and "The Knowledge Society."

Rula Shahwan currently serves as the Director of the Library and Visual Archive Department at the Arab American University. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Goethe University – Frankfurt,  her thesis focus is on fragmented memory, particularly on the looting, destruction, and loss under Israeli Settler Colonialism. She is also a specialist in Palestinian cinema studies. Shahwan’s career began at the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, where she led the Cinema Archive Department. She later transitioned to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation as the Head of the Visual Archive Unit, where she successfully restored portions of the lost archive and oversaw digitization initiatives. Her M.A. in Conflict Resolution included a thesis titled, The Power of Visual Archive, Collective Memory, and National Identity.

Fatima al Bazzal is a doctoral researcher at the Bibliotheca Arabica project (2024-). She holds a Master of Arts in Information Sciences and a Bachelor of Arts in Library and Information Management from the Lebanese University. She has extensive library and archival experience, having worked as a Metadata and Reference Librarian at the Lebanese National Library, where she contributed to cataloging, policy development, and the relocation of the library’s collection. Fatme has also participated in archival projects like the Virtual Museum of Censorship with MARCH Lebanon and the Feminist Library of the Knowledge Workshop, as well as a project on the personal library and archive of the late Professor Hassan Chalabi, in Beirut. Her Ph.D. project focuses on the manuscript heritage of the Jabal ʿĀmil region, specifically the endowed collection of Asad Allāh ibn Muhammad Muʾmin al-Khātūnī al-ʿĀmilī in the Astān Quds Library, Mashhad, Iran which was donated in the year 1067 AH/1657 AD . Fatme's research explores the provenance history of this collection, placing it within the context of the migration of ʿĀmilī scholars to Safavid Iran, who attained various academic and administrative positions in the emerging Safavid state and played a significant role in reshaping the religious identity of the Safavid Empire.

Tamara Rayan is a PhD candidate in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, specializing in Archives and Digital Curation. She received her MI in Information Studies and MA in Ethnomusicology from the University of Toronto. Her research is focused on deconstructing how colonialism operates through archival infrastructures as well as how to build transformative archival representations of those in diaspora. Specifically, she is interested in how to better serve and represent the recordkeeping needs of Palestinians with unique intergenerational traumas, impacted by forced migration, displacement, and exile. She is an Anti-Racist Digital Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, a former steering committee member of the SAA Archivists and Archives of Color section, and a former ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow. Her research has been published in Across the Disciplines and Archival Science. https://www.tamrayan.com/

Dr. 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 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.

Ghada Dimashk is an experienced archivist and metadata librarian specializing in Middle Eastern heritage, with a focus on preserving cultural narratives of Lebanon and Palestine. At the Palestine Land Studies Center at the American University of Beirut, Ghada has led initiatives to develop a precise cataloging and archival system, creating structured policies and a specialized list of subject headings focused on the Palestinian case. Since October 2023, she has led a project in collaboration with the Archives & Digital Media Lab (ADML) to archive social media and webpages as part of documenting the Gaza genocide and War on Lebanon. This initiative is now recognized as the first in the Arab world, and globally, to document an ongoing war on social media platforms. Ghada is an Archival & Library Fellow at the ADML; Co-Chair of the Middle East Librarians Association’s Archival Arrangement and Description in Arabic  Subgroup (ARMTAG); and a member of the organizing committee of the Archive & Heritage for Palestine Seminar Series.   From 2009 to 2023, Ghada was the Librarian at the Lebanese National Library. She holds a master's degree in Library & Information Science from the Lebanese University, where she completed a thesis project mapping the Lebanese LAM sector, and developing a pilot online portal to increase accessibility and preservation efforts.

Dr. Mariam Karim is a Lebanese-Iraqi Global Postdoctoral Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar (#IAS_NUQ) and the founder of the digital humanities project, Nasawiyyah: Arab Media History. She is a member of the Steering Council of the Archives & Digital Media Lab where she also serves as a Feminist Histories & Archival Fellow. Karim completed her PhD at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (iSchool) and the Women and Gender Studies Institute (WGSI). She served as an inaugural graduate fellow at the University of Toronto's Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) and was the recipient of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral award. She holds an Honours BA in Visual Culture & Communications from the University of Toronto and a MA in Cultural Studies & Critical Theory from McMaster University. Her research agenda explores Arab Feminist Media from the 20th century. She situates contemporary uses of digital media through historical inquiry and studies Arabic mass-media in the context of media imperialism and colonialism. To do this, she follows Arab women’s expansive mass-media practices, contributions, and ideas from the 20th century as central points of reference. @nasawiyyah  

Zaynab Nemr is currently pursuing an MSc in Information Management from the Lebanese University, alongside an MSc in Environmental Geoscience and an MSc in Sustainable Blue Growth, jointly offered by the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics (OGS) and the University of Trieste. She is a researcher at the American University of Beirut, where her work focuses on mapping the dynamics of settler colonial land dispossession in Palestine. Between April 15, 2023, and May 15, 2024, she served as an archivist at the Palestine Land Studies Center at AUB, where she also held the role of GIS expert. During this time, she led multiple mapping projects, including a detailed analysis of the Israeli destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure. This project involved classifying impacted sites—including schools, hospitals, and cultural heritage landmarks—using advanced polygon destruction data to precisely catalog affected locations. Her research contributions include the publication “The Environmental Impact of Single-Use Plastics in Lebanon's Tourism Sector” published in the Journal of Ecology and Natural Resources, and “Water as a Weapon: Gaza’s Struggle for Clean Water and Sanitation Amid War”, currently under review.

Joudy Ali Haydar: She is currently in her second year of a Master’s program in Information Management at the Lebanese University, with a focus on data systems optimization and digital preservation. She brings combined experience in information and human resource management, serving as Executive Assistant for the Beirut Airport Renovation Project and as HR Manager and Liaison Officer at the Port of Beirut for Black Delta Defence. She holds a Bachelor's in Information Management and led the development of a functional library at the Port of Beirut. Her final-year project analyzed and improved document management practices at the Lebanese Parliament. She completed internships at the Port of Beirut and the French Embassy, focusing on archiving, cataloging, and indexing. She holds a certificate from the 6th Lebanese Library Association Conference on digital heritage preservation. Her technical skills include cataloging, web archiving, digitization, UNIMARC, LMS, Microsoft Office, Adobe Suite, and After Effects. She also volunteers with the Lebanese Civil Defense.

Karine Makki: is a Master’s student in Library and Information Sciences at the Lebanese University, with a solid academic foundation in Information Management. Her training and experience center on organizing, retrieving, and digitizing information. She currently serves as a Newspaper Digitization Intern at the Institute for Palestine Studies, where she contributes to the preservation of press archives. Previously, she interned as a Web Archivist at the Nami Jafet Memorial Library at the American University of Beirut, focusing on the digital preservation of websites and social media platforms. She holds a certificate of participation from the 6th Lebanese Library Association Conference on the Digital Preservation of Cultural Heritage, organized in collaboration with ESCWA and IFLA. In addition to her academic and professional work, she has been teaching English privately since 2021. She is particularly interested in enhancing access to information through digital tools and archival practices.