Josephine Forman Scholarship: Krystell Jimenez

Krystell Jimenez is the 2018 recipient of the Josephine Forman Scholarship sponsored by the General Commission on Archives and History of The United Methodist Church, in cooperation with the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The $10,000 scholarship provides financial support to minority students pursuing graduate education in archival science, encourages students to pursue careers as archivists, and promotes the diversification of the American archives profession.

Jimenez, who is pursuing a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), is a committed volunteer at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center where she’s worked on a number of projects, including assisting in publicizing a KCET documentary that features the center’s archival materials. In addition, she works as a student researcher on UCLA’s Refugee Rights in Records project, collecting refugee narratives and fact-finding documentation practices in asylum processes in Istanbul. Her passion for the archival profession is fueled by the desire to improve relationships between institutions and communities and to ensure accessibility to archives and record systems that could materially benefit those who most need it.

Jimenez’s supporters were particularly impressed by her “cultural fluency, maturity, and natural sensitivity to how archives and records directly play important positive and negative roles in the lives of some of the most vulnerable individuals in our society” and by her “personal commitment to tackling issues of immigration and the democratization of archives.”