At the national level he served on the Project Action Committee of the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Networking Project for Minority Serving Institutions (AN-MSI) that is being administered by Educause.  AN-MSI’s goal is to assist minority-serving institutions as they develop their camps infrastructure and national connections to become full participants in the emerging Internet-based information age. Chabran is also a member of the American Library Association’s Office of Information Technology Policy Telecommunications Subcommittee that promotes involvement in telecommunication and information technology policy matters by the library community.  Finally, he served as Co-Chair of REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library Service to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking Information Technology Committee that produced REFORMA's Information Technology Agenda. On August 14, 2000, he contributed to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universitites' (HACU) testimony to the Web-based Education Commission that was established by Congress to develop specific policy recommendations geared toward maximizing the educational promise of the Internet for pre-K, elementary, middle, secondary, and postsecondary education learners.

He serves as a project advisor to the University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science Knowledge River: Spanning the Digital Divide program. He has worked closely with various organizations in helping them define the issues concerning the digital divide.  He served as a project advisor on several of The Children’s Partnership’s projects including Online Content for Low-Income and Underserved Americans: The Digital Divides New Frontier, Young Americans and the Digital Future and ContentBank.org He also served on an Experts Panel for Los Angeles United Way’s Latino profile effort known as American Dream Makers that included a section on computer and Internet access.   He serves on the Board of Advisor's of The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology that was founded in 1998 in response to the lack of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in information technology fields in California post-secondary schools in the post-Proposition 209 environment. 

Mr. Chabran has worked in the area of Latino librarianship for over 25 years. He served as the Coordinator of the Chicano Studies Library, now part of the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley from 1975-1979, and also the Coordinator of the Chicano Studies Research Library at UCLA from 1979-1995.

Mr. Chabrán is a founder of the Chicano Database available through Stanford's Eureka system and Chicano/Latino Net (CLNet), a Latino Internet portal. He is a co-editor of Biblio-Politica: Chicano perspectives on library service in the United States (1984) and the Latino Encyclopedia (1996). He co-authored Cyber Access in the Inland Empire, which documents unequal patterns of computer ownership and Internet access. His latest article "Immigrants, Global Digital Economies, Cyber Segmentation, & Emergent Information Services," appears in Immigrant Politics and the Public Library, edited by Susan Luevano, Greenwood Press (2001). "Place Matters, Journeys through Global and Local Spaces" co-authored with Romelia Salinas will appear in Reinventing Technology: Cultural Narratives of Technological Change edited by Marita Sturken, Douglas Thomas, and Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Temple University Press, in 2003.

He chaired the Ad Hoc Committee on LAUC Regional Workshops on Cultural Diversity in Libraries that wrote the Many Voices of Diversity report that was accepted by LAUC in 1992. He also chaired the Working Group on Libraries and Information Resources of the SCR43 Task Force that compiled "Latinos and the University of California Libraries." He is also a member of the UC Ethnic Studies Librarian's Network.

He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of California, Berkeley, Los Angeles, the University of La Verne, and Pitzer College.  Mr. Chabran has lectured nationally in the areas of Latino librarianship and community technology. 

In 1991, he was named Visiting Librarian/Scholar at Michigan State University. In 1996, he was named UCLA Librarian of the Year.  In 1997 he received the UCLA Latino Alumni Association’s Padrino Award and was named as one of America’s most influential Latinos by Hispanic Business. On October 19, 2001 he received the first 21st Century Librarian by Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. He has been recognized by Cruz M. Bustamante, the Lieutenant Governor of the State of California, Congressmen Joe Baca and Ken Calvert, California State Senator Nell Soto and California Assemblymember Rod Pacheco.. In 2002 he was named one of Library Journal's Movers and Shakers. Recently he was named National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Scholar, the Association's life achievement award and received the UCLA La Raza Graduate Student Association Appreciation Award.  

The rest of the Chabran family actively participates in education: His wife Sharon Ann Lemelle-Chabran served as a teacher in the Pomona School Districtat Lincoln Elementary School; his eldest daughter Melissa Ann is working towards her doctorate at Harvard University, his second eldest Rhonda is completed her Masters in Social Work from USC; and his son, Rafael, a California Alumni Scholar, tragically passed away in July 2002, after completing his first year of law school at the University of Chicago Law School. The family established the Rafael Luis Chabran Memorial Fund at the Law School.

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