Capstone Projects | Information School | University of Washington

Life and Times in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District: A Collection of Oral Histories

The Wing Luke Museum's collection of Asian and Pacific Islander oral histories encompasses over 900 interviews. Users can request digital transcripts, but audio recordings can only be accessed in-person at the Wing. For this Oral History Project, we have curated nearly 200 interviews highlighting Seattle’s Chinatown-International District and its various communities; Relevant PDF transcripts and MP3 audio files are now available online through an Oral History website. Not only is this website beneficial for local users, but it is also a tangible tool for the Wing to reach users worldwide who are interested in the Wing’s Oral History Program.

Linked Data for Physical and Digital Collections at the University of Washington

This project set out to create a linked dataset using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) data model, describing Historical Children’s Literature volumes from the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections. The dataset describes both physical items and digital surrogates accessible via UW’s CONTENTdm digital collections platform, including many volumes digitized by a 2017 MLIS capstone group. The publishing of bibliographic datasets using the RDF model has the potential to bring greater exposure to library collections as this structured data can be queried across institutional and subject-area boundaries to connect users to content in new ways.

Lore for LORE: A Needs Assessment for Odegaard’s Learning Object Repository for EWP

In the summer of 2017, the University of Washington’s Odegaard Library created LORE to support EWP teachers. LORE is an online bank of teaching resources, and EWP is a collection of 100-level academic writing classes. Until this winter, an assessment had never been run to tell if LORE was effective. Our team interviewed 8 current instructors who had been introduced to LORE, and who had diverse levels of LORE adoption. We investigated their shared wisdom, or their “lore,” about the online tool. Our project produced recommendations for content and services as well as a replicable assessment process for the library.

Making Connections Alumni Network

Making Connections at the UW Women's Center serves Seattle high-school students with tutoring, mentoring and college preparation. There are hundreds of alumni, the majority of whom are first-generation college women pursuing careers in STEM fields. Although alumni want to network with each other, Making Connections does not have an efficient system to do this. Our web application provides users with a detailed alumni directory and community platform that allow users to network and share resources about job & internship opportunities, scholarships and more. Facilitating alumni networking will help students access resources & feel like part of the Making Connections community.

Making Sense of Misinformation At Scale

Fact-checking organizations have limited resources to keep up with misinformation in this viral age. Prioritization of information allows for more efficient and accurate topic selection. We discuss an implementation of an automated NLP topic-modeling system at Snopes.com, a data pipeline to crowdsource misinformation. Users submit reports through a website and HTML is scraped and parsed into clusters for the Snopes.com reporting staff to act on. Topic modeling provides metrics for prioritization and effective allocation of resources. Our data pipeline reduces the amount of manual curation required by editors at Snopes, which enables them to reallocate their resources to debunking rumors.

Man, You scRipt all the Pages Out: Digital Fragmentology of a 1551 Manuscript and a Recommendation for Best Practice in Special Collections Digital Reproductions

Between 1926 and 1968, a rare bookseller removed leaves from a 16th century German manuscript to sell to collectors and libraries. This process diminished the leaves’ original context and usefulness to researchers today. We tracked down 26 of these leaves in an attempt to create a digital reconstruction of the original bound manuscript and learn additional information about the anonymous author(s) of this work. Through this process, we also evaluated 24 libraries’ reproduction request policies in order to create a recommendation for best practice for digital reproduction requests of Special Collections materials for Stanford University Libraries.

Martyn Mallory Historic Photograph Collection

The Martyn Mallory Historical Photograph collection is the legacy of Martyn Mallory (1880-1936), consisting of 2,500 positives and 1,500 glass plate negatives, depicting early 20th-Century life & topography in Idaho. It was entrusted to the Hailey Public Library in 1995 and digitized through grant funding in 2008. Our Capstone entailed migrating the digital collection of 1,717 files into the LYNX Consortium repository, crafting a controlled vocabulary at LCSH standard to describe the collection, & implementing a metadata schema using the Dublin Core standard. Bringing the collection to library standard increased its value, usability, & increased access to this historical treasure.

MediSend

Transferring medical records today is slow and cumbersome. Medisend allows patients to own their medical records, provide frictionless transfers between clinics and secure storage using Sent.io’s blockchain solution.

MetaCapstone

The University of Washington Information School Capstone is both feared and anticipated. It challenges students to actively begin the transition between academic and professional life. With the goals of innovation and improvement in mind, the iSchool wished to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the Capstone Process as a whole. While several strengths were also identified, this project directly asked past, present, and future Capstone students to identify those areas in which they experienced barriers that hindered their Capstone projects. This information can then be used to the benefit of future cohorts and the iSchool as a whole.

Metadata Tagging the Center on Contemporary Art Digital Archive

In 2016, Seattle’s Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) started the process of digitizing their physical archive. For this project, I analyzed every item in each of the exhibitions in the digital archive and assigned metadata descriptors (tags) in order to make the exhibition items in the digital archive easier to find through online searches.

iSchool Capstone

2018