Cynthia Mari Orozco is the Equity + OER Librarian at East Los Angeles College. She earned her MLIS from San José State University and is a current PhD candidate in Information Studies at UCLA. As a community college librarian, Cynthia engages in instruction, reference, and outreach work and has served as the de facto OER librarian for the past several years. Prior to ELAC, Cynthia was the Student Services Librarian at California State University Long Beach where she first became involved in textbook affordability initiatives. Cynthia’s additional professional and research interests include critical information literacy, oral history, and scholarly communications in community college contexts.
As a community college librarian, Cynthia is particularly interested in the “community” dimension of open education and how OER can reflect and teach to the unique local and hyperlocal contexts of their respective communities. For her capstone project, Cynthia created a resource guide–”More Than Free: Creating, Revising, & Remixing OER to Support Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy at East Los Angeles College“– to show specific local examples of how OER can reflect community contexts.