Biblioteca Complutense

Sarai Lastra

Sarai Lastra is Vice Chancellor of Information Resources and Director of the Virtual Library at Universidad del Turabo in Gurabo, Puerto Rico. She is secretary for the Advisory Board of the Pedro Rosselló Gubernatorial Library, chair of the Community Informatics Center, advisor for the Jane Stern Dorado Community Library, a member of the advisory group for the Museum and Center of Humanistic Studies at UT, and a consultant to various community and public library projects in Puerto Rico.

She holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master's in library science from Dominican University, a master's in quantitative psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a bachelor's degree in elementary education from Interamerican University of Puerto Rico.

Her thesis work titled, 'Making Sense of Community Informatics: The Development and Application of the Community Event Research Method,' focuses on developing a method for uncovering the information wants and needs of a collectivity based on community events. Her research interests are in the areas of the cultural appropriation of information and communication technologies, the development of research methods for community informatics, and the design and use of virtual environments for libraries and museums within the context of Spanish-speaking communities. Her dissertation work was recently published in ISI's 2010 publication: "Information, Communication Technologies, Society and Human Beings: Theory and Framework, edited by Darel M. Haftor and Anita Mirijamdotter.