The project of democracy relies on the public's access to information about government activities. This project increased government transparency and accountability by making archival materials about the Seattle Department of Transportation's urban forestry activities discoverable and accessible. At the beginning of the project, the materials had been backlogged for ten years, disorganized, mixed in with irrelevant items, and unlisted in any public-facing document. This project saw those materials organized by topic and year, labeled, and made discoverable and accessible for patrons. The new, online finding aid provides metadata to help patrons find materials and thick descriptions to give broader context.

GSK’s Heritage Archives maintains the research of Nobel-laurate and biochemist Gertrude Elion. Despite the importance of Elion’s collection, it was hard for archivists to access due to highly scientific terminology, lack of organization, extent, and deteriorated state. To address this problem, I arranged, labeled, and rehoused the physical collection into archival storage containers and created a finding aid that featured a breakdown of Elion’s research. To prevent similar occurrences with future scientific acquisitions, I created a processing guide for research collections. Through this work, users can now confidently access Elion’s and future collections, regardless of their own scientific backgrounds.

The goal of this project was to develop guidance for academic libraries undertaking renovation and reconstruction efforts after experiencing a disaster such as a flood or fire. While research is available on disaster planning and recovery in libraries, most of the resources do little to address the challenges and potential opportunities that come with needing to redesign, renovate, and rebuild spaces damaged in a disaster. Although every situation is different, this project examines the experiences of academic libraries who have undertaken post-disaster renovations, providing insight and advice that can aid others who find themselves navigating the unexpected in the future.

Developed to help elementary grade children learn about their family, Tools for Tiny Historians includes resources on developing an interview, conducting the research process, and compiling family history. Worksheets guide students through the process and help educators create programs that will help their community, and additional linked aids help connect Tiny Historians with outside sources that will support them with any research project. With resources for students and for those working with the students, the project aims to help us learn from the people who came before us and the world of people around us.

The Tutankhamun Centenary: 1922 – 2022 website hosts a collection of Howard Carter’s personal documents and articles from the Times of London describing the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The wealth of information related here had been out of public view for the past 100 years, so this project sought to make these documents accessible to both academics and the curious public. We learned how to use digital tools and platforms to create an online archive; we learned how to document,preserve, and present historical materials; we created metadata and a keyword list; and we integrated our archive into an interactive timeline.

This project aims to assess and revise the crowded library space at Dearborn Park International Elementary School, where students had difficulty finding materials. After completing a space and collection assessment to pinpoint areas of concern, over 1,200 books were weeded, and a revision plan was constructed. Additionally, a survey, focus group prompts, and a participatory design activity was created to include students in the revision process and to help foster a strong relationship with the library. These actions will help produce a library space that improves the students' ability to navigate and access the library and its collection.

Volunteers are an integral part to most non-profit organizations, but often these organizations don’t have the resources to build a sustainable volunteer program. The Volunteer Sustainability Toolkit provides a guide to help onboard and train volunteers while maintaining the volunteer program, regardless of organizational turnover.

In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Washington State Library collected data on service disruptions across the state’s public libraries. We have built on this effort by curating, enriching, and tidying the information in this dataset — adding variables to transform it into a time series, filling in missing values, and archiving the digital sources we referenced for each observation. Our curated dataset and supporting materials, published on the Washington State open data portal, will serve as a comprehensive record to shed light on this historical moment and inform future research and emergency response planning.

This project supported the Washington State Library with weeding the Anytime Library, an online library with over 66,000 titles. The library supports a consortium of public and tribal libraries in Washington State. A literature review was conducted to determine best practice for weeding online libraries. The findings discovered that weeding an online library is not the same as weeding a physical library. As a result, new guidelines were developed and used in the project. The team also developed an evaluation tool and process guide. Only part of the collection was evaluated due to the large size of the collection.

This project sought to identify queer books in a public library's young adult collection and evaluate the various representations, including BIPOC and disabled representation, as well as determine if the tagging system is effective. Utilizing the library's online catalog, Amanda identified nearly 100 materials published from January 2020 through March 2022 within the library's YA collection, with the majority having some kind of BIPOC representation.