The QHS Library Literacy Toolbox helped increase students’ use and access to the QHS Library while improving students’ literacy development. Teachers and students worked together with the school library to create and sustain three interconnected tiers of support, including reintroducing independent reading schoolwide; reestablishing a book club, Jack of Clubs, focused on diverse and #OwnVoices books with social justice/action themes; and creating the first secondary writing center in Washington State, QHS Writing Center, where peer tutors worked with their peers to support them in becoming reflective writers, learners, and thinkers. This library programming can inspire other high school libraries nationwide.

As a part of Read-a-Rama’s efforts to grow, our team created new materials and refined existing resources to lower barriers for staff development and expansion–which has been an obstacle for the organization. We created a facilitator guide, a curriculum template, and instructional videos for camp songs. Our materials enable new facilitators to be more independent of Read-a-Rama’s co-founder, Dr. Michelle Martin, expanding Read-a-Rama’s project capacity. Read-a-Rama encourages a lifelong love for reading through books, stories, songs and movement. As new facilitators are trained to carry out Read-a-Rama programming, more camps and programs can reach new campers worldwide.

As part of their degree requirements, Music Performance majors perform solo recitals. Voice majors have often relied on repertoire recommendations from their voice professors, or have drawn from a narrow range of well-known composers. This project seeks to connect singers to more unique song repertoire via techniques inspired by the “read alike” and Nancy Pearl’s “four doorways.” The “read alike” concept was adapted and placed within a repertoire selection framework as a set of search strategies. The framework allows students to find music that speaks to them, is varied and diverse, and promotes a more research-minded approach to performing.

Team designed and set up a knowledge base and database of past legal advice into MicroSoft SharePoint, with appropriate indexing, organization and taxonomy. This way, Department of Licensing staff can more readily find, understand and follow legal advice, so the agency can become more protective of privacy and spend less time searching for records.

Saint Mary Catholic Church in Corvallis, Oregon, was founded in 1861. Its parish archive opened in 1981. Unfortunately, the archives are tucked in a locked room in the parish hall, preventing newcomers from learning the history of the parish. A website was created to solve this information problem: attached to the main parish website, this site allows parishioners, community members, and those interested in church history to connect with these artifacts. This online resource serves as a door-opener: delivering a portrait of the 160-year history of the parish. 

I created a prototype for a redesigned suite of library staff tools to replace a defunct web portal for the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library. I evaluated what functionalities the library's staff most needed in a tool suite and focused on the two primary functionalities of list-making and material withdrawals. This tool suite was designed using interviews and observational research to be approachable, helpful, and easy to learn. In addition, I focused on clear documentation and resources to lay the groundwork for technical implementation of the program in the future.

Ballard High School had a small but incredibly popular Manga collection. Titles were often checked out, limiting reading options. We created a Manga Club to allow students a voice in building the collection. Students suggested titles and applied for grant funding, ultimately purchasing 250 new titles. Additionally, we met with the Library Leaders Club to learn what students wanted from their library. With their input, we were able to create readers' advisory materials to promote library resources. Our work empowered students to share their expertise, take ownership of their library, and directly shape the collection and readers’ advisory tools.

The Svoboda Diaries Project is a digital humanities collection of 49 diaries that cover the life of Joseph Svoboda as he traded up and down the Tigris river in the Ottoman Empire during the late 19th century. We’ve been working to standardize their implementation of TEI, updating the existing TEI to fit current standards and creating guidelines and future work guides to help direct implementation of the metadata on a broad scale.

Bellevue High School has yearbooks (The Beacon) going back to 1924 stored in the back room of the Library. The older yearbooks are fragile and important to the history of BHS, so it is important for stakeholders to be able to access them. I created an Online Archive complete through 1950 so that anyone can access our Beacon collection at any time without negative consequences for the materials. This project makes a difference for our Bellevue community because now students, staff, alumni, and community members can access these historical documents and learn about the history of BHS.

In 2020, the Lake Washington Institute of Technology library, with their DEI department created the Diversity and Social Justice collection. While the initial work of adding books to the collection was finished, there was much left to be done, including writing a collection development policy and creating finding aids to help students find books within the collection. Our team was able to complete these tasks, as well as establishing collection assessment guidelines and performing an assessment. We believe that, not only have we helped advance the college’s DEI goals, we have helped make the library a more accessible place.