The Cost-Effectiveness Meta-Regression team at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) informs health policy by conducting analyses exploring the cost-effectiveness of health service provisions. This project aims to simplify the maintenance of IHME’s Health Interventions Taxonomy (HIT), while exploring the potential for resource enrichment through annotations. This project resulted in an evaluation of HIT and workplan for improvements, alongside a prototype system demonstrating the benefits of using an ontology for representing and processing the datasets. The evaluation and workplan provides a guide for IHME researchers to transition their taxonomy into a formal knowledge organization system.

The Data Refuge Data Catalog archives federal climate and environmental data. It provides historical snapshots of datasets released on government data portals, which are vulnerable to deletion. Yet the metadata associated with these Data Refuge records have been minimal, and their relationship with the source records have not been clearly defined. To address this, we investigated crosswalking solutions, improved metadata of target datasets, customized an extensible schema, standardized tagging with controlled vocabulary, and documented workflow for future-phase implementation. The results improve trustworthiness and interoperability, facilitate more seamless data discovery and retrieval, and meet the needs of both archivists and researchers.

Access to up-to-date service information is key to providing the best assistance to youth experiencing homelessness. Prior to this project, there were multiple locations where University District service provider information was collected and shared, making it difficult to know what information was current. Utilizing information management skills, team members collected, verified, and merged service provider information into Strappd, an existing mobile app for individuals experiencing homelessness. Team members also updated University District Service Providers Alliance fliers and Doorway Project Google calendars. This project allows information to be better managed by service providers and more easily accessed by youth.

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.

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.

AO3 is a nonprofit run fanwork database with a staff of volunteers organized into committees. AO3 Support frequently receives questions about how to perform basic site functions already answered in FAQs. Video tutorials may make it easier for users to find answers to their questions. However, there are many aspects of the video medium which differ from text. I researched software and created and tested a process for creating screencasts so that AO3 Docs volunteers can create quality tutorials without having to reinvent the wheel.

The Seattle Chamber Music Society’s (SCMS) new move has made way for the new Toby Saks Sheet Music Library, a 1,272-piece collection of solo and chamber music that was once Toby Saks’, a renowned cellist and founder of the SCMS. To organize and preserve the music and annotations, I constructed a five-tier classification system, wrote collection management recommendations, created a preservation and conservation resource guide, improved the searchability of the catalog, and labeled the scores, housed in archival folders. The collection is now browsable, usable and accessible to SCMS staff, visiting musicians, and community supporters for years to come.

As more industries leverage real-time 3D creation, new roles with skill sets geared towards this technology are emerging all the time. For Unreal Engine, this generates an audience of learners with diverse and unique information needs. Unreal Engine taxonomy is the basis for unifying learning materials across sources. By providing standardized terms for Unreal Engine components, it is easier to surface relationships between various learning sources such as webinars, documentation, and online learning courses. Relating this taxonomy with learning skills through ontology strengthens paths and connects users in emerging roles with the learning materials they need.

UW faculty make data-driven decisions every day. From large-scale business decisions to helping students succeed, data analytics affects the lives of everyone in the UW community. The current solution, created by UW Enterprise Reporting and Analytics, uses two portals: B.I. Portal, UW Profiles. Our solution, UW Analytics, addresses current issues such as cost and inefficiency in maintaining two distinct portals, feature underutilization, and inconsistent UW branding. UW Analytics is a one-stop-shop featuring an intuitive, streamlined UI that adheres to UW branding. Less time looking for data means more time for analyzing and making better-informed decisions.

Wrangling the Seattle Times Journalist Files is a project organizing and cataloging the journalist files that were acquired from the Seattle Times by the University of Washington Libraries about 9 years ago. These files contain numerous documents that the journalists collected while researching and writing pieces for the paper. The task of the project was to create a set of guidelines for cataloging these resources so that student workers at the library can continue the work of organizing these documents. A LibGuide was also created for these documents to make them more accessible to the users of the library.