iSchool Capstone

2020

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Promoting Information Literacy Through Indexing

This project involved cataloging a 10,000-document collection of newly digitized, multilingual Law Library of Congress treaties and international agreements. The collection was classified by metadata elements in a master spreadsheet. To ensure users’ ability to fulfill collocating and finding bibliographic objectives, LCSH and indexer-derived keywords were appended to each record. Inconsistencies between records were resolved using OpenRefine and blog posts containing trend graphs and search tips were constructed to promote the collection. When published online, this content will encourage information literacy by helping the organization’s increasingly networked stakeholders navigate and interact with this content for the first time.
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PROSPER with Scalar: Promoting Reliable Open Source Platforms as Educational Resources

To address the information needs of the UW Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Leadership Team, we developed materials that analyze, assess, and provide training on Scalar, an open-source authoring and publishing platform. Through research and examination, we wrote a literature review that compared Scalar to similar publishing platforms, evaluated its accessibility, and examined its potential as an open digital scholarship platform. Additionally, we crafted learning resources and facilitated an interactive online workshop to assist librarians in identifying and promoting Scalar’s features and use cases for future students, faculty, and the broader research community.
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Pseudo-crypto currencies and their implications

With the rapid transformation to the digital age, one sector that has changed the least is the banking and financial sector. After the creating of the first cryptocurrency, there has been an eager push to use this technology to benefit humanity by creating new technologies that harness the power of a decentralized system. Every new technology is a double-edged sword. It can be used to benefit people as well as suppress them if used incorrectly. There have been efforts by organizations as well as countries to use cryptocurrency to collect personal data and evade sanctions.
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PUSHSPRING Marketplace Search

Our marketplace search recommender system is a web app that users can use to explore the apps related to a persona or a given mobile app based on PushSpring's local user data rather than average result such as the ones Google gives. Our system was implemented with both CNN and NLP to maximize diversity and relevancy in recommendations. Combining benefits from both content-based and user-based recommendation models, our model produces valuable insights that can't be found elsewhere.
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Queer Air

The KRAB FM Lesbian-Feminist Radio Program was originally broadcast through the 1970s and 1980s in Seattle and was one of the earliest American gay and lesbian radio shows in the United States. This capstone creates an opportunity to engage with and explore local historical archival material in a different and more accessible way while also highlighting materials in special collections. The project aids in exploration and discovery opportunities while utilizing a format that is easily accessible in the current technological age. This project allows the discoverability of, and for, the Seattle Queer Community.
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Queering ILL

This project seeks to investigate how interlibrary loan (ILL) serves the queer community. Results indicate that many libraries are marketing their ILL services to patrons. Privacy issues occurred rarely. A large portion of the queer community gets their queer material from the library. This community appears to both know about and use ILL services. Reasons queer participants gave for not using the service range from privacy issues to not knowing how to utilize the service. ILL departments can better serve the queer community through targeting them in its advertising, creating inclusive policies, focusing on privacy, and looking into eBook lending.
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RAIN Impact Data Assessment

The Readiness Acceleration and Innovation Network (RAIN), a biotechnology incubator, wondered whether they effectively collect data about their educational programming. They were concerned with effectively measuring their impact, as well as issues around underrepresented groups in the sciences. This project included in-depth background research, a data collection audit, analysis of organizational artifacts, and stakeholder interviews to make recommendations for their data collection and curation practices. Best practices were presented to collect demographic data about underrepresented groups and to make RAIN events more welcoming.
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Raise Wages Now

Our sponsor, Raise Wages Now, needs a tool for its members to build profiles which engage and incentivize them to answer more questions. Our main work is creating a member information collection tool, or a profile builder. As our sponsor uses the Drupal, a content management platform, on their website, our solution is to design a new Drupal module that we can add onto theirs. The main technologies we used in our solution were PHP for the back-end and Vue.js for the front-end.
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Read-a-Rama: A Trauma-Informed Care Approach

According to the landmark study done by the Center of Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente (1997), Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) that happen in childhood can have lasting negative impacts on a person’s mental and physical well-being. Read-a-Rama is an early-literacy non-profit that works with children who come from diverse backgrounds, and life experiences that include trauma and ACEs. Read-a-Rama: A Trauma-Informed Care Approach involved the creation of five tailored trauma-informed care training modules and a comprehensive resource LibGuide for staff. This project will help staff foster a safe, collaborative, and empowered early-literacy environment through the principles of a trauma-informed care.
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Recommendations for (Re)Describing Japanese American Incarceration Archival Collections

Memories of Japanese American incarceration have been plagued with incorrect and euphemistic terms that downplay and erase the racism, cruelty, and trauma of incarceration. This language has also made its way into archival descriptions. This capstone aimed to better understand the terminology and language used by the Japanese American community and scholars and to develop archival guidelines for writing more accurate descriptions. A set of recommendations was developed with metadata and technical suggestions. These recommendations will help archivists (re)describe their Japanese American incarceration collections with more appropriate terminology and context.