Based on MELA’s expressed solidarity with Palestine in its statements MELA Affirms Solidarity with the Palestinian People (2021), and MELA Statement on Gaza (2023), and with approval of the MELA Executive board, MELA is initiating its working group on Palestine (WGP).
The MELA Working Group on Palestine (MELA WGP) is focused on coordinating our community of colleagues engaged in Palestine solidarity initiatives.
Our aim is to build community, spread awareness, initiate projects, collaborate with other initiatives, coordinate efforts, and recommend actions supporting Palestine to preserve its culture through MELA and beyond.
MELA Working Group on Palestine brings together librarians, archivists, and information professionals of diverse expertise who will work together to help preserve Palestinian culture created by people (scholars, authors, poets, writers and artists), and represented in institutions (universities, schools, bookstores, libraries, and archives) and collections (stolen, damaged, endangered, print and online).
Based on their areas of expertise, MELA WGP members will be actively working on related efforts, liaising with others (individuals and organizations) including MELA’s various committees or outside initiatives, and reporting to the working group.
Values and Principles
- We aim to center Palestinian voices and the objectives of Palestinian organizers, including in Palestine and the diaspora.
- We recognize the essential role of collective memory in the context of Palestinian liberation, and are committed to leveraging our memory and information resources in support of this aim.
- We advocate for the preservation of historical resources, archives, and digital resources pertaining to Palestinian culture and history.
- We advocate for fair representation of diverse Palestinian perspectives in collections.
- We advocate for robust accessibility and discovery of resources.
- We support academic freedom to carry out libraries and archives work (collecting, teaching, programming) and support our academic communities.
- We affirm the values of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as foundational to our solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
Current Subgroups and Projects:
Collections
The purpose of this subgroup is to build guides, blogs and other tools to spread awareness on collections about Palestine.
Sohaib Baig, Collecting Arabic Books from Palestine: A Survey of Selected North American Library Holdings (2025)
Cataloging, Access and Discoverability
The purpose of this subgroup is to address issues and challenges in enhancing the discoverability of resources on Palestine and Palestinians through special projects such as developing cataloging recommendations and guidelines, proposing LC subject headings that provide more adequate representation, and investigating alternative vocabularies.
Recommended Guidelines for Improving the Discoverability of Resources on Palestine, Version 1.0, November 2025 (Working Group on Palestine Subgroup on Cataloging, Access and Discoverability) Feedback welcome
Social Media
This subgroup gathers and shares content for education and advocacy through the MELA social media accounts, promoting collection material, resources, projects and initiatives preserving and amplifying Palestinian experience, heritage, history, and cultural memory in library and archival spaces.
Social Justice for Palestine: This subgroup organizes events, panels and workshops through MELA Social Justice Committee to focus on Palestine and Palestinian voices. The group collaborates with other groups for this purpose.
Wiki + Palestine: This subgroup works on projects to expand and enhance Palestine’s content on Wikipedia and Wikidata. The project page is available on Wikidata at:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_MELA_on_Palestine
Web archiving efforts: MELA Librarians are collecting web-based resources documenting the current war on Gaza as part of the IPLC Web Archiving project.
For questions and more information, please reach us at wgp@mela.us.