Meet and Greet
JPL’s Archives + Special Collections
Maya Pasternak
Director of Archives and Special Collections (She/Her)
Maya has run archives, their curation, and digitization for two decades. She has run the archives of the Center for Digital Art (Holon, Israel), the Center of Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv, Israel), the Noa Eshkol Foundation for Movement Notation (Holon, Israel), and is currently the Director of Archives and Special Collections at the Jewish Public Library (JPL), Montreal. In addition to a Masters of Information in Archiving and Records Management, her major in User Experience Design has been instructive for understanding workflows, assessing user needs, identifying pain points, and implementing creative problem solving techniques. Another of her backgrounds is interdisciplinary art and social practice. They inform her approach to fostering positive environments for people’s discovery of archival and rare materials. Maya has curated international archival exhibitions for the Sydney Biennale (Australia), the Kunstverein (Amsterdam), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe, Germany), La Filature (Mulhouse, France), Jerusalem Film Festival (Israel), and more. On any given day at the JPL Archives, you might find her preserving fragile documents, fundraising for archives operations, accepting a new donation of materials, or reboxing containers in the stacks to make more room for community artefacts.
Sarah Benlolo
Digital Archivist (She/Her)
Sarah is an archivist with a special interest in digital asset management. She is currently leading the Jewish Public Library Archive's migration to AtoM, as well as coordinating digitization efforts for some of the Archive’s most precious materials. Sarah holds a Bachelor of Arts in Contemporary Studies from the University of King's College, a Master of Arts in Critical Theory from the University of Leeds, and a Master of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University. She has previously worked at the Levi Strauss & Co. Archives (San Francisco, Calif.), The Prelinger Library (San Francisco, Calif.), and the Marks & Spencer Company Archive (Leeds, UK). On a regular day at the Archive, you might find Sarah verifying the location of a Fonds in the stacks, having a lively discussion around unique identifiers, or pulling materials for digitization.
Sam Pappas
Reference Archivist (She/Her)
With a Master of Information Studies from McGill University, Sam primarily works to connect researchers and other interested users with the JPL Archive’s materials. Sam previously worked at McGill's Archives and Special Collections, and at the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec. She then worked at her professor’s Disability Archives Lab, where she performed user-centered research about the accessibility of archival spaces and material – a cause which she has carried with her to the JPL-A, and whose research she co-presented at the 2023 ABQLA (Quebec Library Association) conference. You can usually find her in the Archive’s reading room fielding research questions, learning Yiddish on Duolingo, or digging through the stacks to look for an unlabeled record from the mid-20th century.
