The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project consists of 19 volumes of letters and diaries from the Golden Age of Egyptology (1889-1913). Built in Omeka, the website has not been updated since 2013, yet it has accrued a wealth of content. Our project set out to restructure the information architecture, redesign the metadata by creating linked relationships, and edited the custom theme to improve usability.

Captain David Wilsey, M.D., was one of 27 doctors who entered Dachau concentration camp during its liberation in April 1945. They spent the next month giving medical care to former prisoners. The liberated prisoners were quarantined to prevent the spread of disease. These physicians risked their lives to bring healing to the 30,000 survivors. During his deployment, Wilsey wrote more than 280 letters home. This collection brings these materials together online for the first time. It involved metadata creation, digital curation, community engagement, and educational resource creation. The collection will be housed online permanently for the Holocaust Center for Humanity.

16 crimes per day occur in Seattle. This is 115% higher than the national average. Working directly with The University of Washington’s Police Department, our mission is to increase the sense of safety on campus by keeping University Residents informed of nearby crimes in real-time. The core of our project is to amplify the accessibility of UWPD’s crime data for technical users through a public API, and for non-technical users through a public visualization dashboard. Through these tools, residents will be empowered to make better decisions surround their safety.

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are cyber-physical systems that allow operators to monitor and control complex industrial processes, such as those found in energy, manufacturing, and other critical infrastructures. ICS operators face numerous challenges, especially information overload, reliance on disparate information sources, and a lack of aggregated, consumable, and intuitive ways to gain insights on ICS vulnerabilities and risks to protect their assets. By leveraging thoughtful user-centric design, we worked with FireEye to create and organize a structure for meaningful relationships between vulnerabilities and assets, designing a user-friendly system to display information that is both easy to understand and actionable.

The goal of this capstone was to revise the Drama and Theater taxonomy in Resources for College Libraries to make it more equitable in its classification and consistent in its structure. Revisions were informed by targeted readings about controlled vocabulary development, and domain research from The Essential Theater by Oscar G. Brockett. I was able to update the taxonomy to make it more equitable and consistent by using these resources and feedback from my sponsor. These changes will make the taxonomy easier to keep current going forward and easier for librarians to use for collection development.

Refugee Women’s Alliance’s Early Learning Center is a preschool for children three to five years old, providing multilingual and multicultural childcare and education. The ELC’s classroom libraries are made up of primarily donated materials, and therefore have no cohesive organizational structure. ReWA’s ELC preschool teachers needed an organizational system for their classroom collections, as well as instructor guides to aid them in identifying books for lessons on specific subjects. After completing an inventory and evaluation of the collection our team developed an organizational system, identified gaps in the collection, and offered recommendations to fill those gaps.

The Virginia Beach Public Library compiles its key data into a single spreadsheet that is then used to create strategic planning documents. This spreadsheet contains a compilation of data from the various branches and is subdivided into strategic planning categories. The Virginia Beach Public Library staff recently acquired a new business intelligence tool and requested that I try to make their data live rather than static. This would reduce time and effort in creating their periodic reports to the city of Virginia Beach. My efforts with led to the creation of a dashboard accessible via the web and mobile devices.

The hardworking board members and volunteers of the Washington National Guard Museum have dedicated themselves to collecting, preserving, and displaying the rich history of Washington State’s brave military personnel. By continuing initial cataloging efforts of the Museum’s vast photographic collection, and beginning to make the entire collection available through an online database, our team helped further the Museum’s mission to instruct, inspire and educate all citizens. This project ensures the Museum’s goal of becoming an essential research library will soon become a reality.

The digitization of art images has created new opportunities for artists, researchers, and students to explore visual arts. However, many digital art libraries are difficult to navigate. This is because they lack metadata to describe their images, which makes finding images based on their content hard. We applied computer vision techniques to a dataset of art images to create an art recommendation system.

For my capstone project, I processed and created finding aids for five visual materials collections from UW Special Collections. As a result of this project, materials that were previously inaccessible to researchers are now contextualized and fully searchable through Archives West and UW Digital Collections. Multiple steps had to be taken in order to make the materials accessible: researching and arranging materials, housing materials in appropriate archival housings, encoding materials using the XML publishing program XMetaL Author, scanning images and creating digital surrogates, and revising finding aids based on the feedback of UW’s Visual Materials Curator Nicolette Bromberg.