East Asian libraries in the United States were born from the rise of Asian studies. Today, given the challenges of the outbreak of COVID-19, hate crimes against the Asian community, and the suspension of international trips, East Asian libraries must figure out new ways to provide their services and access to collections. This project is sponsored by UW's Tateuchi East Asia Library, aimed at understanding the information needs of the community and increasing its influence and visibility to continue providing effective information support for scholars and students in the new reality.

UCSC’s Special Collections needed to discover the prevalence and nature of outdated and problematic language within hundreds of finding aids that archivists have created. After conducting research and composing a literature review, I performed an extensive audit of the finding aids that included in-depth reviews of individual aids as well as keyword searching through the entire collection of finding aids. The changes that will result from this project will decrease the marginalization of subjects contained within the records while simultaneously allowing users of the finding aids to engage with a more inclusive discourse for resource description and access.

Bird the Gap is an outreach-oriented web mapping project to direct birdwatchers to locations currently underrepresented in crowdsourced data compiled by eBird and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. My multi-layered interactive web map uses two sets of raster data from eBird’s statistical models to identify geographic gaps in worldwide data from 2018. Using open-source software programs RStudio and QGIS, I prepared data for all 52 weeks. The scalable prototype uses Mapbox and its JavaScript library to visualize data from one week in July. Bird the Gap will assist in eBird’s ongoing mapping projects, which support scientific research and conservation efforts.

For this capstone project I partnered with the Breman Museum, a Jewish heritage museum in Atlanta, GA, that is working to broaden their visibility by creating exhibits for the Atlanta roll out of the Google Arts and Culture project. I created two archival exhibits, focused on Jewish human rights advocates, described and uploaded a hundred artifacts to the online collection, and wrote an exhibit creation guide for staff and volunteers. This project brings to light Southern Jewish voices, humanizes the Jewish experience, and stimulates awareness of the collections held by the Breman Museum.

Documents reflect the historical contexts of their creation, and in doing so, become information objects. The serial novel is a type of information object, but due to re-editioning, reversioning, and digitization, most readers have lost touch with its historical significance. This analysis of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849–1850) uses the lens of information theory, in relation to literary criticism, historiography, and the history of the book, to grasp the serial novel as an information object, arguing that doing so requires intimate familiarity with the physical nature of the book in parts and the historical context of its production.

Dr. Ann Huppert and Dr. Pamela O. Long are developing a history of the Church of the Gesù, the first Jesuit church built in Rome. I implemented data organization, performed data entry, and created a Table of Contents for the 16th-century account book. The TOC tracks peoples involved, monetary transactions, materials, and other details relevant to construction that occurred between 1568 and 1581, and establishes a relationship between folio photographs and corresponding pages of the transcription. My work complements the researchers’ architectural and historical expertise, giving them a clearer picture of the construction project and facilitating the capture of data.

For many years, local libraries have been unable to field requests for access to both of Coeur d’Alene’s high schools' yearbooks. The solution has always been to refer patrons to the high school administration. These requests put an added burden on school secretaries and, because of school hours and school holidays, there is limited access throughout the year. Library workers and school administrators will now be able to easily forward requests to cdarchives.org for access to LCHS’s yearbooks. Plans have been created for both the upload of CDHS’s yearbooks and a full marketing campaign.

“Collections as data” (CaD) goes beyond traditional archival practices to analyze cultural heritage collections that support computationally-driven research. We analyzed George Mason University’s (GMU) Special Collections Resource Center’s (SCRC) procedures and metadata, drafted a report for the SCRC, and presented our findings. The team liaised between the SCRC and GMU’s Digital Scholarship Center (DiSC), a stakeholder in CaD initiatives and digital scholarship. This project modified SCRC’s workflows, procedures, and standards, improving accessibility to data-driven digital scholarship. The emerging strategic partnership between the SCRC and DiSC will provide researchers with new opportunities to interact with special collections materials.

Our capstone is for UW's Sephardic Studies Digital Library. It focuses on the research needed for launching a crowdsourced transcription site for the 400+ digitized materials in Ladino, Sephardic Jews' endangered language, housed in their Digital Library. Our goal is to offer a place for the global Sephardic community and researchers to have access to Sephardic cultural heritage. We explored various transcription platforms to write a paper for best practices and created assessment and rubric sheets to better inform our sponsor. This results in the Sephardic Studies Program having the research complete before making design decisions for their transcription platform.

The Northwest Annual was a yearly exhibition of painting and sculpture by Pacific Northwest artists, hosted by the Seattle Art Museum from 1914 to 1977, and served as a significant cultural event for regional artists. In order to properly manage and promote archival materials about the NWA, a new digital exhibition was created for SAM. This involved digitizing the original checklists, creating descriptive metadata, using OCR to improve search, restoring photographic material, and interviewing local NW art experts. This digital exhibition will now enable online access to these materials, providing rich information for researchers interested in 20th century Northwest art.