Master of Library & Information Science Portfolio

The Question Is the Mechanism: AI Personhood Evaluation and the Classificatory Apparatus of Selective Recognition

Classification systems determining personhood across psychiatric, gender, animal, and corporate domains share a five-part structure converting subjects' self-knowledge into evidence against them. Through corpus analysis, this paper shows AI governance frameworks replicate this apparatus, raising questions for how information professionals design, describe, and provide access to records these systems produce.

Download (.docx)

I came to library and information science from the law. I spent two years in the Immigration Policy Clinic at the University of San Francisco School of Law researching and drafting Ninth Circuit appeals for asylum seekers, petitioning successfully for changes to the San Francisco police code to produce better incident reports for non-native English speakers, and meeting clients whose relationships with institutions depended entirely on whether a record existed, whether it was accurate, and whether it could be retrieved. I did not realize, while I was doing this work, that I was already a librarian. Every memorandum I produced was an authority record; every case file I reconstructed for a client who had moved across three jurisdictions was a disambiguation problem; every request to the Executive Office for Immigration Review for a transcript that was supposed to exist and did not was a lesson in what happens when the infrastructure of recall fails the people who most need it. My goal is to become a law librarian because law librarianship is where the questions I care about — how institutions organize information, how that organization produces or denies access, and how trained professionals can intervene on behalf of the people on the other side of the reference desk — are asked in the form I am best prepared to answer them.

My internship at the Law Library of Congress, completed through UCLA during Winter 2024–2025, confirmed that intuition. I produced metadata descriptions of bill summaries from Congresspersons serving between 1935 and 1972 to improve the accessibility of congress.gov, and worked on HTML revisions to improve the display of Library of Congress collections documenting United States law. What looked like a narrow cataloging assignment was, in practice, a continual act of judgment about identity, representation, and durable access: determining how a bill summary should describe a legislator whose name, party, or district had changed across sessions; rendering historical statutory language so that contemporary researchers could actually find it; and confronting the gap between the accessibility aspirations of congress.gov and the experience of a user trying to trace one piece of legislation across decades. The work drew on everything my legal training had given me — statutory interpretation, attention to jurisdictional context, the habit of verifying authority — and added to it the specific disciplinary tools of librarianship: controlled vocabularies, authority control, the theory and ethics of description. That combination is what law librarianship asks for, and it is what I want to spend the next decades of my career providing.

My coursework at UCLA has been deliberately organized around that commitment. IS 422: College, University & Research Libraries and IS 423: Public Libraries gave me the institutional contexts in which law libraries operate — academic, governmental, and firm-based — and grounded me in why the profession's historical division among those contexts matters for how legal information is produced, curated, and disseminated. IS 260: Description & Access built formal competence in descriptive cataloging, subject analysis, and the infrastructures of retrieval that underlie every legal research session. IS 262A: Data Management & Practice and IS 279: User Experience Design prepared me for the law library as it is actually evolving: an environment in which research assistance is increasingly mediated by databases, knowledge-management systems, and interfaces whose design materially shapes what attorneys and the public can find. My Spring 2026 coursework — History of Technology and Computational Creation After AI — extends that preparation into the rapidly changing environment that law libraries now navigate on behalf of their patrons.

Alongside coursework, I have taken on service roles that I see as integral to the profession rather than adjacent to it. I serve on the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (COLASC), where I have contributed to discussions on library collections, scholarly communication policy, and the University of California's ongoing engagement with commercial publishers. I serve as Director of Internal Affairs for the Department of Information Studies Graduate Student Association, a role that has taught me that professional community is something librarians build for each other as well as for their patrons. I intend to carry both commitments forward — into the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), the Law Librarians of Southern California, and the Special Libraries Association — because the professional infrastructure of law librarianship is sustained by the people willing to staff its committees, write its reports, and mentor its next generation.

My prior legal experience is the foundation on which I plan to build. Before and during law school I worked with the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice; La Raza Centro Legal in San Francisco, where I wrote memoranda for asylum seekers in complex procedural postures and ran community "know your rights" events; the Kiran Nair Law Group in removal proceedings; and the Justice for Animals Program at USF, where I contributed to Litigation & Liberation (Ecology Law Quarterly 2023). The through-line across those roles was research: finding the governing authority, reading it carefully, and translating it into something a client, a court, or a coalition could use. Law librarianship is that same task, performed at the scale of an entire collection and on behalf of an entire user community — and it is the task in which my legal training keeps working for me rather than becoming something I leave behind.

I am therefore targeting a career in law librarianship across two overlapping tracks. The first is academic law librarianship: the law school library, where reference, collection development, and legal research instruction intersect with the training of the next generation of attorneys. I am particularly interested in serving at institutions whose student bodies include significant numbers of first-generation law students, clinical students, and students from immigrant and working-class backgrounds — because that is the population I came from, and the population whose questions I am most prepared to answer well. The second track is firm-based research and knowledge services, where the JD-plus-MLIS profile is recognized by the American Association of Law Libraries as the field's most competitive credential. I am currently a candidate for research and knowledge analyst roles in private firms, and the experience would give me a level of fluency in practice-side legal information — docket analytics, competitive intelligence, current-awareness systems — that I would eventually want to bring back to an academic setting.

Across both tracks, my longer-term goal is to contribute to the scholarly and professional literature of law librarianship. My graduate work has included sustained writing on the organization of knowledge, the politics of classification, and the history of institutional description — subjects squarely within the disciplinary conversation at Law Library Journal, Legal Reference Services Quarterly, and the AALL annual meeting. I see the writing as continuous with the service work: another way of staffing the reference desk for the profession as a whole.

What I hope to be, in short, is a law librarian of the kind my own clients and colleagues once needed and did not always have — a professional fluent in the substantive legal materials, rigorous about the metadata that makes those materials findable, clear about the ethical stakes of access, and committed to keeping the reference desk open for the people most likely to have been turned away from it elsewhere. The MLIS formalizes that commitment; the years of legal work made it specific.

INF STD 260: Description & Access

Winter Quarter 2025 · 4.0 units · Grade: A

Reflection

IS 260 was the course that gave me the professional vocabulary I had been using intuitively throughout my legal career. The class moved from the conceptual foundations of bibliographic description — why we describe, for whom, and under what theory of retrieval — through the practical machinery of RDA, MARC, and BIBFRAME, and into the politics of subject access through Library of Congress Subject Headings and the ongoing debates about what controlled vocabularies include, exclude, and naturalize. We cataloged across formats, built authority records, and critiqued the descriptive standards we were learning to apply.

What made the course foundational for me was not the technical content alone but the recognition that every cataloging decision is a judgment about who will be able to find what, and under what terms. When I later began my internship at the Law Library of Congress producing metadata descriptions of congressional bill summaries from 1935 to 1972, I was drawing directly on what IS 260 had taught me: how to handle name changes in authority records, how to render historical language for contemporary discoverability, and how to think about the user on the other side of the search box. The course is the reason I can articulate why a law librarian needs to understand descriptive standards — not as an abstract professional requirement, but as the infrastructure that determines whether a researcher finds the statute, the legislative history, or the regulatory guidance they need. Every reference transaction I intend to conduct as a law librarian will depend on the work that catalogers do, and IS 260 is where I learned to do it myself.

INF STD 289: Information Technology, Surveillance & Borderlands

Spring Quarter 2025

Selected Work

CBPPWN — GitHub Repository

Reflection

IS 289 examined how information technologies operate as instruments of state power at the U.S.–Mexico border. We read Jason De León's Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, which traces how surveillance infrastructure, biometric databases, and mobile applications like CBP One do not simply enforce policy but actively produce the categories of “legal” and “illegal” that determine who the state recognizes and who it renders invisible. De León's ethnographic work showed us that these systems are not neutral conduits of information — they are classificatory apparatuses that shape life-and-death outcomes for migrants, and that the data architectures underlying them carry political commitments that go unexamined when treated as purely technical problems.

My project, CBPPWN, was a direct response. Using Android Studio emulation, Appium test automation, and Python's Faker library, I built a tool to automate the submission of erroneous data to the CBP One app — turning the same scripting and systems-infrastructure skills taught in the informatics curriculum against the surveillance apparatus the course had asked us to analyze. The project required me to reverse-engineer the app's package structure, automate UI flows across a mobile emulator, and generate realistic synthetic data at scale — all core informatics competencies applied to a question the course itself posed: what does it mean to use information technology not only to study power but to contest it?

This course and this project are why I chose the informatics specialization. The technical skills — systems infrastructure, automation, data management — are the same ones that make a law librarian effective at building research tools, managing knowledge systems, and designing interfaces for legal professionals. But IS 289 taught me that those skills are never value-neutral, and that the information professional's obligation extends beyond efficient retrieval to a critical understanding of what the systems we build and maintain actually do to the people who encounter them.

Polling DeepSeek-R1: A Digital Humanities Analysis of LLM Censorship and the U.S.–China AI Arms Race Narrative

INF STD 298B · Winter 2025 · Grade: A

Download Paper (.docx)  ·  GitHub Repository

Fall Quarter 2024

Course	Title
INF STD 211	Artifacts & Cultures
INF STD 278	Information & Visualization
INF STD 423	Public Libraries

Winter Quarter 2025

Course	Title
INF STD 260	Description & Access
INF STD 270	Systems Infrastructure
INF STD 298B	Digital Humanities: Methods, Critique & Creation

Spring Quarter 2025

Course	Title
GENDER 495	Feminist Pedagogy
INF STD 212	Values & Communities
INF STD 289	Information Technology, Surveillance & Borderlands

Summer Sessions 2025

Course	Title
ANTHRO 146	Urban Anthropology

Fall Quarter 2025

Course	Title
INF STD 262A	Data Management & Practice
INF STD 279	User Experience Design

Winter Quarter 2026

Course	Title
INF STD 400	Portfolio Design
INF STD 422	College, University & Research Libraries

Spring Quarter 2026 In Progress

Course	Title
INF STD 289	History of Technology
INF STD 291C	Computational Creation After AI

Faculty Advisor

Cindy Nguyen, Assistant Professor, Department of Information Studies, UCLA

Advising Meetings

Date	Format	Topics Discussed
Oct 7, 2024	In person	New-student orientation advising. Discussed first-quarter course selection (IS 211, IS 278, IS 423) and how my JD background could inform elective choices. Prof. Nguyen suggested anchoring early coursework in the core while exploring public and academic library tracks.
Nov 18, 2024	Email	Checked in on progress in Fall quarter. Discussed the Law Library of Congress metadata internship opportunity for Winter 2025. Prof. Nguyen encouraged applying given my legal research background and interest in authority control.
Jan 13, 2025	In person	Winter quarter advising. Reviewed course plan: IS 260 (Description & Access), IS 270 (Systems Infrastructure), IS 298B (Digital Humanities). Discussed how DH methods course could complement the LC internship and feed into potential portfolio topics. Talked through specialization options; Prof. Nguyen noted informatics would let me combine my technical and legal-research interests.
Mar 10, 2025	In person	Mid-quarter check-in. Discussed the DeepSeek-R1 censorship project in IS 298B and its suitability as the major paper. Reviewed LC internship work on congress.gov metadata descriptions. Prof. Nguyen advised on connecting the DH project to broader informatics themes for portfolio coherence.
Apr 14, 2025	Email	Spring quarter course confirmation (GENDER 495, IS 212, IS 289). Discussed IS 289 (IT, Surveillance & Borderlands) as a strong elective for the informatics specialization, particularly given my immigration law background. Prof. Nguyen recommended engaging with De León's work in relation to my own legal experience at the border.
Jun 2, 2025	In person	End-of-year advising. Discussed the CBPPWN project from IS 289 and whether it was appropriate as a portfolio elective example. Prof. Nguyen affirmed it demonstrated core informatics competencies (automation, systems infrastructure, data generation) in a context that showed critical engagement with course material. Began discussing issue paper topic — the classificatory apparatus argument connecting AI personhood to prior domains.
Oct 6, 2025	In person	Fall 2025 advising. Confirmed remaining coursework: IS 262A (Data Management & Practice), IS 279 (User Experience Design). Discussed timeline for portfolio completion. Prof. Nguyen suggested enrolling in IS 400 (Portfolio Design) in Winter 2026 and targeting Spring 2026 for presentation.
Jan 15, 2026	In person	Portfolio planning meeting. Reviewed draft issue paper (“The Classificatory Apparatus of Selective Recognition”) outline and 50-word summary. Prof. Nguyen provided feedback on scope and suggested tightening the five-part apparatus framework. Confirmed IS 422 (College, University & Research Libraries) as final elective. Discussed professional development statement angle — law librarianship.
Feb 24, 2026	Email	Submitted 50-word issue summary to Prof. Nguyen and the Student Affairs Officer per program requirements. Prof. Nguyen approved the topic and noted the corpus-analysis methodology was a good fit for the informatics specialization.
Apr 7, 2026	In person	Final pre-submission advising. Reviewed complete draft portfolio: issue paper, professional development statement, coursework examples, course list, CV, and accessibility statement. Prof. Nguyen recommended minor revisions to the professional development statement to strengthen the connection between the LC internship and law-librarianship career goals. Confirmed digital portfolio format and accessibility approach.

Program Milestones

• Admitted to UCLA MLIS program — September 23, 2024.
• Metadata Analysis Internship, Law Library of Congress (through UCLA) — Winter 2024–2025.
• Completed core coursework — Spring 2025.
• Declared Informatics specialization — Fall 2025.
• Portfolio Design (INF STD 400) — Winter 2026.
• 50-word issue summary submitted — February 24, 2026.
• Portfolio submission and presentation — Spring 2026.

Download CV (PDF)

This portfolio is built to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, Level AA, and to be usable by the widest possible range of readers, including those using assistive technology. Accessibility is not an add-on to this site; it is part of the work the portfolio is meant to represent. Library and information professionals have a specific obligation to the people our systems can make invisible, and this page exists to state the commitments I hold the site to and to tell you how to contact me when it falls short.

Design commitments

• Semantic HTML. Content is structured with real headings, lists, and landmarks so that screen readers and keyboard users can navigate by structure rather than by visual scan.
• Skip-to-content link. A skip link appears on first Tab press on every page to bypass repeated navigation.
• Keyboard navigation. All interactive elements are reachable with the keyboard, and focus is shown with a visible, high-contrast outline.
• Color and contrast. Body text meets WCAG AA contrast (black on white at 4.5:1 or greater); the site does not use color alone to convey meaning.
• Text sizing and zoom. Type is set in relative units so that browser zoom and reader-mode rendering work without layout breakage up to 200 percent.
• Alternative text. Informational images carry descriptive alt text; decorative images use empty alt attributes.
• Language declaration. Every page declares a document language so that screen readers pronounce content correctly.
• Responsive layout. Pages reflow cleanly on small screens and remain fully functional without horizontal scrolling.

Downloadable documents

The downloadable portfolio PDF and individual section PDFs are produced from the same underlying source as the web pages. Documents are saved as tagged PDFs with a defined reading order, document title, and language. Microsoft Word originals are available on request.

Known limitations

The site uses the Bootstrap 5 CSS framework, whose default widgets generally meet WCAG AA but are not guaranteed to. Third-party icon fonts (Font Awesome) are loaded with aria-label fallbacks on interactive elements. Embedded PDF viewers inherit the accessibility features of the reader the visitor is using; if an embedded PDF is not reachable by your tooling, the download link beside it always is.

Alternate formats and feedback

If any part of this portfolio is not accessible to you, please tell me. I will provide the content in an alternate format at no cost and in the format you specify — including plain-text transcripts, large-print PDFs, or accessible Word documents — and I will use the feedback to improve the site.

Contact: jheer@g.ucla.edu. I aim to respond within three business days.

Last reviewed: April 2026. Statement scope: all pages hosted at janemontanez.net/portfolio.