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.