TellToo focuses on the journey we take as individuals to find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in life. For many of us, technology has changed the way we socialize. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have pushed social interactions to shorter, less personal, and more trivial exchanges. This has left certain core elements of socialization in the dust. Our project focuses on modernizing those elements and building a platform that delivers a more human centric method of sharing and connecting. Our mobile application allows users to tell stories through audio recording and visually navigate chains to naturally related stories.

Since 2013 the Oregon Hops and Brewing Archives (OHBA) has been dedicated to collecting and archiving materials related to hops and brewing in Oregon. Currently, OHBA lacks a formal Loan & Digitization agreement form that addresses intricate copyright issues, and is concise and understandable for OHBA and Special Collections and Archives Research Center (SCARC) donors. To address this problem we researched the practices of similar institutions and copyright issues, created multiple form drafts, a supplemental LibGuide, and conducted a usability survey. The end product of our capstone project is a Loan & Digitization form that is organized, offers room for thorough description, contains copyright information and protects the OHBA and donors from potential donation problems. The addition of a LibGuide keeps the form concise while still providing users with supplemental information that will save the OHBA time and work in the future. The final form will be adopted by OHBA and SCARC.

Seattle Art Museum’s Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library has a collection of print annual reports dating from 1932 to the present. To digitize the collection, we scanned each report, assigned metadata, and uploaded the documents to a Shared Shelf webpage. We then built an online exhibit to showcase the collection using the web platform Omeka. Finally, we worked with marketing and communications to promote the new digital collection. By digitizing the entire set of reports, we empower users to access these materials independent of library staff, and we free valuable physical space in the library. This collection is also unique because while other museums nationwide do make some reports available online, their collections only include the prior 10-15 years. We believe through the promotion of these reports and the stories they tell, we share an important part of Seattle history, and help further SAM’s mission to Connect Art to Life.

According to a recent national study of ebook usage, between 2013 and 2014 demand for ebooks grew more among middle school students than any other educational group (School Library Journal, 2014). Gildersleeve Middle School is BYOD (bring your own device) but the library’s collection includes only two ebooks. Our project was to develop a complete proposal for an ebook collection that would significantly expand the existing collection and reflect the culturally and linguistically diverse student population. We developed a proposal that detailed students’ information needs, evaluated several vendors, proposed specific titles for acquisition, developed a budget, and outlined innovative ways to promote the new collection. Now, thanks to this project, the librarians at Gildersleeve have a complete proposal for developing a new ebook collection, as well as a list of recommended ebooks to purchase. The only thing left for them is to implement the proposal and grow their ebook collection.

In many cultures, oral storytelling and folktales are an important tool for elders to share the intimate lore and cultural norms with future generations. Individuals and institutions are coming to the realization that generations of stories are being lost. Efforts to preserve these treasures have largely been dedicated to oral histories and personal narratives. Folk Mic is a publicly-accessible online repository for recordings of folktales. The project creates a framework for any storyteller, amateur to professional, to add their folktales and original stories. Furthermore, users are able to search for the stories using newly developed metadata and to develop more sophisticated metadata as the project grows in size. Folk Mic promotes the value of hearing and seeing a storyteller weave a tale rather than simply reading it. Now, future generations will have an online database where they can watch, hear, and record more storytellers.

The Kearsarge Seed Savers Group is a small group of farmers and gardeners in rural New Hampshire with an interest in preserving open pollinated seeds that are either rare or of local interest. Due to competition with hybrid varieties more suitable to long distance transport and disease resistance, more than 90% of the United States fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. This group’s mission is to preserve heirloom varieties whilst also creating a Darwinian effect that increases production by saving seeds from the best plant and utilizing each generation. Although dedicated to the conservation of often long forgotten varieties, the group has struggled with organization and communication. The solution presented was the development of an Access database to serve as a dynamic catalog for the seed collection that monitors inventory levels for storage and distribution. This is connected to a website for means of communication via xml.

Caldera is an Oregon-based nonprofit that provides mentoring to students through arts and environmental programming. Its staff works with youth year-round for seven years, starting in middle school and continuing through high school graduation. The White House recently recognized Caldera as one of only twelve nonprofits to receive the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program (NAHYP) Award. As the organization celebrates its 20-year anniversary, its stakeholders have become critically aware of the need for an organized, centralized digital image repository to serve as an archive of organizational history and enable discovery to promote future work. Currently, its digital images exist across upwards of ten poorly organized hard drives. For my Capstone project, I have assessed Caldera’s collection and available technology and developed a long-term project plan for establishing a repository. This plan includes recommendations on ingest, preservation, and discovery.

Currently teachers use tedious methods of note-taking such as paper journals, post-its, general note-taking apps and even memory. With elementary school class sizes increasing as well as the emphasis of individualization, keeping track of every student becomes a significant challenge. To face this challenge, we proposed to build a cloud-based web-application that allows elementary school teachers to quickly take notes on students while also providing skill-tracking and rubric management. The goal of Jot is to provide teachers a note-taking experience that allows them to track various aspects of an individual student. Our application aims to make an impact by ensuring that there are notes taken on each and every student leaving no one behind. By helping organize student notes, skills and creating reminders, we know that Jot will help teachers better guide the future of our children.

Making Connections with Linked Data: Identities and Identifiers at University of Victoria Libraries Robbyn Gordon Lanning (MLIS) Linked data empowers libraries and archives to connect rich stores of local data to global audiences through the use of common identifiers and standards. The University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries possesses over 2.9 million records, each of which uses text strings as resource identifiers. In order to participate in the semantic web, UVic Libraries must prepare its metadata, transitioning its records from textual representations of people, places, and subjects to internationally accessible Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). To assist UVic in meeting this challenge I implemented a study reconciling randomized datasets from each of UVic’s four record repositories to linked data identifiers. This research culminated in a report providing detailed reconciliation results, suggestions to overcome obstacles encountered, and best practice recommendations for future reconciliation work. By assisting UVic Libraries in preparation for transitioning its “strings” to “things”, this project has helped enrich the exposure, interoperability, and accessibility of UVic’s information holdings.

On March 22, 2014, a massive landslide engulfed the Steelhead Haven neighborhood near Oso, Washington. In seconds, Steelhead Haven was gone and State Route 530, the primary road to nearby Darrington, was buried in debris. 43 people died. In the weeks that followed, the Darrington community contributed vital expertise, equipment, and support to search and recovery efforts. Since then, the Darrington Historical Society has launched an ambitious project: development of an archive at UW Digital Collections to document the community’s experiences (http://content.lib.washington.edu/landslidesweb/). We made three significant contributions to the project: First, we created a collection development policy that will guide the archive’s growth. Second, we designed a tracking system to organize and manage the collection. Third, we greatly increased the size of the archive by processing a backlog of photos, documents, and maps. The community’s recovery will be a long one; our work ensures their story won’t be forgotten.