Using the Historical Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Washington, Special Collections, we aim to shed light on how much can be gleaned from the study of children’s literature of the past. With this project, we have created an online exhibit with teaching tools and research guides to garner more public engagement with this collection. Our goal is to provide access to these items in order to inspire studies, share with others, and encourage future use of UW Special Collections materials.

The Freeport Community Library has over 8,000 children’s books and finding age appropriate books at the correct reading level is hard for children and their caregivers. To solve this problem, a new shelving location was created for early chapter books. Early chapter books were moved to a new shelving location, provided new call numbers and spine labels, leveled using Fountas & Pinnell, and marked with identifying stickers to signify them early chapter books. By creating a separate section for early chapter books, children and caregivers are now able to find early chapter books at the right reading level.

Busy students and professionals spend too much time rereading material to study or learn. While notes help with studying faster — few people have the time to write notes for everything. This results in inefficient review of materials, the loss of precious time, and losing crucial information by skimming content. Enter Cicero, a cutting edge web service that leverages advanced technologies to auto-generate notes for individuals with heavy readings. With Cicero, users will be able to save time by generating customizable summarized notes of study material they have already read before.

The Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) Seattle Archives Wiki Project, upon culmination, will be a go-to page for those who are interested in learning more about CoCA. It will also give the Center a new way to reconnect with past artists and presenters, curators, and audiences, both general and within the arts community, “to tell the whole CoCA story”. Although the CoCA gallery is several contemporary art museums/galleries, this project will still be a great way to allow Seattle residents, visitors, and those who are located elsewhere to get a glimpse of another aspect of the history and spirit of the Seattle contemporary art scene.

My capstone focused on beginning the preparation of CoCA’s slide collection for digitization as part of an ongoing effort to preserve CoCA’s history through their digital archives project. The slides contain images of exhibitions, artists, performances, forums and other events related to CoCA’s shows. Since CoCA has a large slide collection, the project focused on slides spanning the years 1982 – 1989. Over 1500 slides were viewed and organized into binders according to exhibition, total number of slides, duplicates and number of sheets in each section. The project also included creating an excel spreadsheet connecting the work with CoCA’s archival finding aid.

Webrecorder is a free, open-access web archiving software that excels at capturing dynamic, born-digital content. Its technology is powerful, but its user base is largely unknown to its creators at the NYC digital arts non-profit Rhizome. For my project, I collected data through a structured survey and a structured email interview as well as semi-structured, in-depth interviews with select volunteers. I coded these data to prepare them for qualitative analysis, which I will do after graduation. From this analysis, I will create a roadmap of recommendations for the Webrecorder team and points to touch on when writing their user documentation.

CoSphaera is an online language community that connects college language professors nationally in an effort to break down the anxieties associated with learning a new language. Learning a second language is as important now as ever; however, in today’s universities students struggle to practice their conversational skills due to the anxiety of this social interaction and fear of making mistakes in front of their peers. CoSphaera will allow language professors to connect with compatible classrooms in the US, in an effort to provide students with a “revolving-door” experience to conversational language practice, thereby connecting classrooms and breaking down these social anxieties. Nerds R Us | Halle Friedland, Chris Leatham, Adam Sebetich, & Heng Yon | INFO

The California Ballet Company Library has been in progress for many years. Donations of books and magazines have been collected since the 1950’s. The quantity and diversity of the materials amassed demanded organization. A collection development policy, as well as a best practices cataloging document were definitely needed. Consultation with the stakeholders from CBC and research into the professional literature was undertaken. A mission statement, a vision statement, as well as guidelines on how to build the library, in order to meet that vision, were crafted and incorporated. These documents will shape the library and ensure its longevity and usefulness.

The Seattle Public Library has developed outreach programming for adult learners that is flexible, dynamic, and heavily utilized--program strengths that also make assessment difficult. In order to capture richer qualitative data associated with the individual impacts and outcomes, our team created and piloted two survey-based assessment tools. These sustainable tools will augment current program practices and support its evolution in alignment with the needs, interests, and continued growth of both learner and tutor participants. Their implementation presents our sponsoring organization with the opportunity to gain greater, measurable insight into how the programming is benefiting the community it serves.

It’s no secret that environmental conditions are changing rapidly and it’s more important than ever to predict the accompanying consequences. Collecting environmental data is not only expensive, but dangerous. We created an algorithm that allows environmental professionals to fill in missing data and explore interactions between correlated variables. This permits scientists to gain an understanding of our dynamic ocean and help us prepare for and mitigate any potential environmental harm. Be sure of your data with DataShore!