Tania Ríos Marrero is Program Manager at the Digital Public Library of America.
She is a librarian and facilitator with 10+ years experience building programs and partnerships across libraries, archives, and cultural organizations. Previously, she led open educational resource development at the Digital Library of the Caribbean, University of Florida. As a community organizer at the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation, she developed citywide engagement and network strategy for library and public space redesign initiatives. She has a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Washington and a bachelor’s degree in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College.
Please introduce yourself! Then, draw a circle around the system, or systems, that you are engaged in and that you are trying to change. What feedback loops and patterns occur inside this system? How do external forces beyond the system, such as political, economic, or technological forces, affect, shift, or impact the system you are working within?
My name is Tania Ríos Marrero. I’m a librarian based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, born and raised in Philadelphia. Throughout my career, my work has been rooted less in collections themselves than in building partnerships in and around libraries. I see libraries as places where people connect–not only to information, resources, and ideas, but also to one another. At their best, they create opportunities for shared learning, creativity, and working together in meaningful ways.
Over the past several years, I’ve come to appreciate the technical and stewardship dimensions of collections development and archival work. I’ve supported a range of archival projects, particularly with small, community-based organizations, helping strengthen their capacity to preserve and share the histories and knowledge in their care. This work has taught me that collections and community engagement are not separate endeavors but most powerful when they inform one another.
I began a new role at the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) in September 2025. Before that, I worked at the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), where I led a program supporting open educational resource development and digital publishing for Caribbean Studies. Through that program, I had the opportunity to collaborate closely with many talented researchers and educators from around the world, as well as with librarians and archivists throughout the Caribbean, but mostly in Puerto Rico.
But the way I think about digital libraries was shaped much earlier by my work in public libraries. In 2016, I became a community organizer at the Free Library of Philadelphia, leading community engagement for the reopening of the Lillian Marrero Library in North Philadelphia. That library is named after my mother, who was a librarian and community leader there for more than a decade until her death in 2005. I practically grew up in that library, so returning there for my first library job was meaningful.
My role was to reconnect the library with the surrounding majority Puerto Rican community after a long renovation. At its core, the work was about listening to community needs and working with library staff to design programs and services in response. More broadly, it was about cultivating a sense of ownership and belonging and helping people see the library not simply as a public service, but as a community resource they had the power to shape.
In 2017, after Hurricane Maria, many Puerto Ricans arrived in North Philadelphia after being displaced from the island. Together with colleagues and neighborhood partners, we transformed the library into a volunteer-run mutual aid hub. It became a FEMA case clinic, distributed food, clothing, transportation, and language assistance, and helped families navigate the rehousing process.
In that moment, the traditional boundaries of what a library could be expanded to meet the needs of the community. I came to understand libraries as social infrastructure, as institutions that communities can adapt. That experience fundamentally changed how I think about librarianship.
Today I work in a very different context. Digital libraries are fundamentally different from public libraries; they are not rooted in a physical place or neighborhood. Yet they are guided by many of the same core library values and, at their best, remain accountable to the people they serve, whether partners, contributors, or broader publics.
Working in digital libraries has expanded my understanding of what that accountability requires. It brings into focus a different set of ethical questions around access, ownership, control, reuse, and the responsibilities involved in preserving, interpreting, and stewarding historical and cultural memory. More broadly, it has led me to think about how we build knowledge systems that reflect public values.
That brings me to the system I want to talk about today: the open digital library ecosystem. One of the things I most appreciate about dLOC is its post-custodial model. Much like the public libraries that shaped my thinking, I think platforms like dLOC have the potential to create opportunities for organizations and communities to exercise greater self-determination over how their materials are preserved, described, and shared.
Can you tell us, for readers, what is the relationship between the post-custodial model of archives and the traditional, centralized collecting model of archives?
The traditional Western model is custodial. Institutions collect, interpret, and govern materials, often displacing them from their place of origin. A post-custodial approach shifts away from that extractive model by recognizing communities as the owners, stewards, and decision-makers of their own materials.
That’s what drew me to dLOC. Rather than centralizing collections or authority, it functions as shared open infrastructure that connects libraries, archives, educators, scholars, and community organizations across the Caribbean and its diaspora. What brings that network together is a shared commitment to preserving and expanding access to Caribbean history, memory, and knowledge. Through that collaboration, platforms like dLOC can offer an alternative to more centralized models of scholarship by demonstrating that open access and collaborative stewardship can produce a better and more equitable knowledge commons.
One aspect of dLOC that I find interesting is its approach to metadata. Rather than enforcing a single descriptive standard or controlled vocabulary, it makes room for multiple languages and descriptive practices. It’s kind of messy, and comes with tradeoffs. Materials can sometimes be harder to discover than they would be in a more tightly controlled system. But it also allows contributors to describe materials in ways that reflect their local contexts. I think, in that way, dLOC recognizes that there is no single authoritative way to organize or represent Caribbean knowledge, and that inclusivity sometimes requires embracing complexity rather than imposing uniformity. It may sound counterproductive, but I’ve come to appreciate that not every library needs to be perfectly ordered to be meaningful or useful.
Another issue I think about is infrastructure inequity. Who has the capacity and “authority” to build, preserve, and share digital collections? Across the Caribbean, many libraries and archives lack the funding, staffing, or technical capacity to build and sustain digital collections. I think platforms like dLOC are valuable because they help redistribute that capacity through shared infrastructure, resource sharing, skills exchange, training. The goal is to ensure that participation in the historical record is not determined by institutional wealth alone.
Thank you for sharing context and grounding for readers of the interview about what your value system is, and what experiences have shaped what you recognize as the systems you are trying to change, and also how your agency is situated within those systems.
So there are a few different systems named here: There are open digital libraries. There are descriptive systems. There are systems and mechanisms for knowledge production. There is the open access ecosystem. There is also physical, place-based infrastructure, which is its own set of technological, concrete, and palpable systems.
All of these are present in the work that you do.
One of the central questions I ask in the Puerto Rican context is, how do we practice archives here? Questions of description, access, infrastructure all look different in a place shaped by climate precarity and decades of austerity imposed on our cultural institutions.
Over the past four years at dLOC, working from Puerto Rico, I’ve spent time in libraries and archives here, building relationships with practitioners across the island. I’ve seen the conditions they work under, the limitations they navigate, and the work they accomplish with so few resources.
Here, archival work is often very grassroots. It depends on relationships, ingenuity, reciprocity, and care as much as it does on formal infrastructure. It has shown me that archives are not simply collections or institutions; they are ongoing social practices sustained by people who are committed to preserving memory despite chronic underinvestment and recurring crises.
Working in this context has also challenged many of the assumptions embedded in dominant American archival models—assumptions about institutional stability, what resources are necessary, what infrastructure should look like, and who gets to define best practices. Puerto Rico has taught me that archival innovation doesn’t only emerge from well-funded institutions. It also emerges from communities that have no choice but to continually adapt, collaborate, and create new ways of doing things under conditions of constraint.
Would it be accurate to say that the change you are trying to advance, in partnership and within whatever organizational context you are in, whether dLOC or now the Digital Public Library of America, is a shift toward community knowledge sovereignty?
Both in terms of ownership and stewardship of materials, and in terms of process: Who decides what best practice is? Who decides what is right in a given place, among the people who are directly connected to that work?
I think that’s right. For me, community knowledge sovereignty means that communities should have meaningful authority over their own cultural memory. Not just over the materials themselves, but over the decisions about how they’re described, preserved, accessed, and cared for. That’s essentially the principle I’ve been working toward across different contexts.
How do you connect systems change work with day-to-day work? What does it actually look like in practice, in different forms? A few prompts for this are: how do you design processes for collaborative work that move the change you are trying to accomplish? What strategies do you use? How do you create the conditions to bring other people into this work in solidarity with you?
In what ways do you help people who may not already articulate things this way, or see the system as you see it, recognize themselves within it?
One project that illustrates how I might connect systems change with day-to-day work was the Revitalizing dLOC initiative, which sought to ensure that dLOC’s future would be shaped by the priorities of its partner institutions, rather than by assumptions made within the organization.
As part of that initiative, I co-facilitated, with Mila Aponte-González, a year-long planning engagement with the Archivo Histórico de Vieques (AHV), a community archive in Vieques. The Intensive was a sort of strategic planning process, but intentionally designed as a collaborative framework for identifying, documenting, and responding to partner priorities while also helping dLOC critically examine its own services, assumptions, and ways of doing things. The goal wasn’t only to produce a strategic work plan for AHV, but to create a process through which both the partner institution and dLOC could learn from one another and evolve together.
I think that “systems change” in this case looked like designing the process itself with as much care and intention as the outcomes. We paid attention to who set agendas, how meetings were facilitated, how decisions were documented, and how we created space for honest conversations about what was and wasn’t working. Rather than positioning ourselves as experts bringing solutions, we designed conditions where AHV could define success on its own terms and where those priorities could influence dLOC’s thinking.
This work also required flexibility. Midway through the project, AHV experienced a partial roof collapse, and our priorities shifted entirely toward supporting them through that. We intentionally deprioritized the original work plan because the process was grounded in the reality of our partner’s needs rather than in predetermined deliverables.
To me, systems change in practice might look like designing collaborative processes that create shared definitions of success, and allow partnerships to shape one another through relationships of trust. It also means helping people recognize that they are not simply participating in a pre-set system or structure but have the ability to influence and change it. Sometimes the meaningful outcome isn’t a new collection but a stronger relationship and a new way of working together.
How do you, not at the level of organizational containers you have worked in, or project containers, or even individual relationships, but from your positionality within these systems, think about measurement or assessment? What feels most resonant to you in terms of evaluating this work? What is the evidence you look for that tells you the extent to which your efforts are advancing the systems change you are invested in?
I think, if relationships outlast the project or the grant that brought people together, that is a measure of success and change. If people continue to call one another, collaborate, share resources, or show up for each other after the funding ends, or altogether in spite of funding, then that is perhaps a sign that something deeper has changed.
One framework that has influenced my thinking comes from Marika Cifor and Michelle Caswell, who describe archivists and community archives as participating in a web of affective care. That resonates with my experiences in Puerto Rico in particular. I think about success in terms of the strength of that web. Whether people trust one another enough to be transparent, vulnerable, and honest, and whether they can stay in relationship through disagreement, tension, or moments of uncertainty.
Those kinds of relationships are difficult to quantify but they’re tangible. You can see them in the ways people reach out to each other, freely share resources and time, and continue working together because they recognize they are accountable to one another and not to a funder or an institution.
In Puerto Rico, that is significant. The work of archives is inseparable from protecting our collective memory and our capacity to preserve it in the face of ongoing colonial erasure. No single institution can do that alone. Our ability to sustain relationships is part of our collective capacity to protect our memory.
I really appreciated you not talking about financial sustainability or the longevity of institutions, but focusing on people, whether in a room, virtual or otherwise, being able to stay with the tension and the discomfort.
What we are ultimately aiming toward, through this collaborative conversation, is to better understand systems leadership within the knowledge landscape, alongside colleagues whose work aligns with values like information equity.
Do you see moments where systems leadership frameworks [i.e., reading materials provided] apply? How did they land for you? And do you see them reflected in the interventions you described, or is something else emerging for you, maybe even a critique?
I found myself not really connecting with some of the language of systems leadership. I can understand the frameworks intellectually, but I don’t naturally think or talk in those terms.
The reading that resonated most with me was Leading Together for Systems Change by Sida Ly-Xiong. I appreciated her emphasis on creating conditions for change through connection.
What I appreciated about the materials overall is that they pushed me to think more explicitly at the macro level. Much of my work at dLOC was locally grounded in Puerto Rico. That experience made me attentive to power and the relational conditions that make collaboration possible. I wasn’t ever calling that “systems leadership,” but in retrospect I can see some of those practices as systems interventions.
Now, in my new role at DPLA, I’m working at a larger scale. I’m interested in how the lessons I learned in the Caribbean context might be able to inform work across DPLA’s network of American libraries.
And Tania, that is really helpful. I should also say this for readers. Frameworks are sometimes, I think, best understood in conversation with experience. In Madison Snider’s interview, and in the [upcoming] conversation with Miliaku Nwabueze, who is a Just Tech Fellow, a couple of things have come up that really resonate with what you are saying.
One thing Miliaku said that might resonate is this: when they draw a circle around a system, they see it as existing within the mundane interactions between two people. It is in those interactions that broader systems like capitalism, colonialism, sexism, and ableism show up and are either reinforced or interrupted. So when you keep circling back to the relational piece, it makes sense, because these systems show up at every scale.
Madison said something similar in response to the framework question. She said that frameworks are useful to think with. What you are doing when you apply a framework to your own experience is testing its limits. Through that process, you begin to articulate your own framework, one that is grounded in your experience and in the experience of the communities you are in conversation with.