The WRI Oral History Project documents the history of the Welfare Rights Initiative (WRI), a grassroots student activist and community leadership training organization located at Hunter College. The aim is to examine, via these oral history interviews, social movement activity at the level of a grassroots organization as exemplified by the WRI, which was developed to aid student welfare recipients to become agents of social change and actively involve them with policymaking.
Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning ToolThe CUNY Dominican Studies Institute (CUNY DSI) at City College has recently developed the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool, an online interactive resource to assist users in the learning of the deciphering and reading of manuscripts written in Spanish during the early modern period, roughly from the late 15th to the 18th century. Cynthia worked as a metadata consultant on the project, which was supported by a $50,000 start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities.
Crossing Borders, Bridging GenerationsCynthia works as an interviewer for the Brooklyn Historical Society on the “Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations” project, which analyzes mixed-heritage issues, cultural hybridity, race, ethnicity, and identity.
Cynthia Tobar is a cross-disciplinary metadata specialist/archivist experienced in digital project planning and implementation, including the development of metadata best practices, controlled vocabularies and taxonomies aimed at improving and maximizing information retrieval for digital content. Cynthia is adept at bringing together specialists in humanities, digital technologies, library science, and archival science to engage as a team in the planning and designing of open source, publicly accessible digital humanities teaching and learning tool prototypes.
Previously, Cynthia was an Assistant Professor/Metadata Librarian at the Mina Rees Library at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor specializing in metadata education at Pratt Institute. Prior to her time at the Graduate Center, she was Senior Metadata Creator for the Museum of the City of New York and a cataloger, archivist, and metadata creator for the Wilson Processing Project, where she processed archival materials from the collections of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. She was also a project archivist and metadata specialist for the Lighting Archive © Project, which digitized the theatrical lighting documents of: Tharon Musser, A Chorus Line, 1974; Richard Nelson, Sunday in the Park with George, 1984 and Jules Fisher, HAIR, 1968.
Cynthia is the founder of the WRI Oral History Project, which is documenting the Welfare Rights Initiative (WRI), a grassroots student activist and community leadership training organization located at Hunter College. Cynthia has also collaborated with the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group, where she conducted life history interviews with OWS occupiers. Cynthia received her Master’s degree in Political Science from New School University and her Master’s degree in Library and Information Science, with a certificate in Archival Management, from Pratt Institute.
Research interests include:
For more on Cynthia’s varied professional pursuits and interests, feel free to connect via LinkedIn
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