Gentrification has affected many community members and long-time residents in the Central District area more specifically the Yesler neighborhoods. Many families were forced to move out as rent started to increase and buildings started getting torn apart which destroyed its rich history. Our web page aims to help native residents experiencing the effects of gentrification, a platform to share their voice as well as provide them with resources as well as help new residents moving in by providing historical facts about the rich history of the neighborhood.

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.

Accessing comprehensive course information before registration is critical for UW students to select courses that best satisfy student needs and interests. However, our research indicates that over 60% of students express that course information is limited on current solutions, such as MyPlan and Rate My Professors, and most end up asking friends for course recommendations. By leveraging official data from Course Evaluation Catalog, we aim to empower students’ understanding of courses’ content, difficulty, workload, and peer evaluations. With UW Course Expert, students can optimize their course selection and enhance their academic potential.

The Fortnite Creative Documentation site provides users with information to build their own custom islands and interactive game experiences. However, the existing site was spun up so quickly that the site design needed to be improved to meet primary audience needs. For this project, we generated both the short-term and long-term suggestions for the Epic Games to optimize their website through providing high-fidelity prototypes and a UX content analysis. Users will benefit from best practices in search and navigation in our design, and Epic will have a more accessible website with matched branding and higher user engagement.

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.

Library of Congress Subject Headings perpetuate the biases of the sources used to establish them. For Indigenous and other peoples, standard research practices using written reference sources may result in subject terms that do not reflect what people call themselves or wish to be called. Changing our approach to gathering and prioritizing information can result in more ethical and accurate representation of people and peoples in library catalogs.