Karen Li-Lun Hwang, a graduate student at Pratt Institute in New York, is a 2016 recipient of the Society of American Archivists' Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award. Established in 1993, the award recognizes minority graduate students of African, Asian, Latino, or Native American descent who, through scholastic achievement, manifest an interest in becoming professional archivists and active members of SAA.
As a student, Hwang has focused on making minority narratives more accessible to the public through linked open data and through her work with community archives. She has worked with the Asian American Arts Centre in New York City to create a digital archive to advance Asian American art and with community archives in Brooklyn, such as Interference Archive. She believes that “without the ability to apply methods for discovery on the internet, mainstream histories would promulgate and advance at the expense of specific narratives told from within community archives.” Her work with the Linked Jazz team at the Pratt Institute and the “We Won’t Move”: NYC Tenant Movements Exhibition at Interference Archive in 2015 has established a practice of bringing together resource materials from heterogeneous collections to offer more nuanced portraits of history.