Fighting Words is a collaboration with students and faculty from the Theater, and Film and Media Arts departments at the University of Utah. Actors performed dramatic readings of quotes from American Revolutionary War pamphlets printed on both sides of the Atlantic. This project brought students into the library where they experienced rare books through their own disciplines. Videos of the dramatic readings accompany text and images from the original books on a multimedia website, www.fightingwordsonline.org. Viewers are guided through the exhibition in chronological order, learning about the origins, conflicts, and ultimate conclusions of the American Revolution from the words of the people who lived it. A dynamic website connects users to material and facilitates experiences with rare books outside the library.

The Seattle Interactive Media Museum (SIMM) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to being the leading reference institution in archiving and exhibiting the ever-evolving world of digital interactivity to the public. Designed for curious amateurs as well as industry professionals and academics, the SIMM has several goals: 1) housing interactive exhibits that showcase both the history and future of interactive media, including a walk-through history of video gaming, 2) developing and maintaining the world’s largest physical and online collection of artifacts from the interactive media realm and 3) providing a comprehensive and publicly available online library of interactive artifacts.  These goals are backed by a state-of-the-art cataloging and collection system co-developed by the SIMM and a graduate studies program at the UW’s iSchool.

The Fluke Corporation is a fast growing company with many factories, each of which have their own reporting methods and terminology used in daily work and reporting. This siloed environment has caused inefficiencies for employees who frequently rotate assignments to different areas of the business. The Fluke Taxonomy Project was initiated to define taxonomy for the Fluke Operations function and develop a taxonomy template for other functions within Fluke to use. The goal of the taxonomy is to drive toward a common language that would help better unify the corporation. The taxonomy would also serve as a structural taxonomy in terms of development of a common reporting and information management portal. The project identified many recommendations to make Fluke more efficient.

UW Libraries’ Special Collections houses numerous rare collections, including a one-of-a-kind photo album detailing the construction of Seattle’s iconic Smith Tower. However, many students and researchers know nothing of the valuable resources in Special Collections. To raise awareness and spark the community’s interest in its unique offerings, Special Collections enlisted our help. Knowing the power of advertising’s most multi-sensory medium, we chose a novel approach to solve Special Collections’ marketing need. We wrote a documentary script about the facts, myths, and stories surrounding the Smith Tower. The script, which has been delivered to KCTS (Seattle’s local Public Broadcasting Station) for potential production, incorporates images and video from Special Collections. The planned documentary will highlight the rare photographs, footage, and ephemera available in Special Collections, bringing increased visibility to Special Collections and the University of Washington.

UW Medicine’s data centers are located in a ten mile radius within the Puget Sound area, and could be impacted by the same disaster. Our project is helping the IT Services Data Center team prepare for a remote DR site to improve information assurance. By applying HIPAA DR guidelines to refine and document backup, monitoring, and data center DR processes; ongoing efforts for process improvement that address continuously evolving technology, and an increasing dependency on IT for quality patient care can be assured. This will result in increased systems availability enabling UW clinicians to provide the best healthcare when it’s needed most.

Open access to scholarly publications nurtures the collaborative nature of impacting research. For biomedical researchers, the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy (NIHPA) also makes it a requirement to ensure continued and future funding of their work. Completed in collaboration with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s (FHCRC) Arnold Library, this project aimed to assess the NIHPA compliance of publications from one biomedical research institute in order to understand their past adherence to this policy and provide recommendations towards optimizing the access of future publications. This included the development and population of a publication-tracking database – enabling the analysis of the institute’s past compliance rate and compliance-related services (library interventions) – and a comparison of these local tracking efforts to the new NIH Compliance Monitor tool. Based on this work, recommendations for the future tracking, assessment, and improvement of the FHCRC’s public-access compliance were provided.

At Golder Associates (Golder), Business Information Services (BIS) have a diverse user population of over 9,000 employees and consulting clients located worldwide. BIS provide support in multiple business aspects such as general administration, communication and knowledge management. As a result of the organization’s rapid growth, user experience has become a critical requirement of BIS. In our strategy project, we work with Golder End User Relations Function on mapping methodologies and staffing needs of user experience requirements. We made recommendations on how the areas of user analytics, system usability, and information accessibility can be improved within BIS. Our strategy document informs Golder with up-to-date methodologies through example processes developed on real scenarios. With our strategy document, Golder will be able to build a professional user experience function that effectively connects people and technology.

Among the many online services that provide communication channels for groups, there is a lack of singular services that provide users a way to easily interact with each group in one place. In order to communicate with their respective groups, 25 out of 27 people we surveyed online use four or more services, including email and various social media sites. Coordinating so many different services across multiple groups is tedious, challenging, and often results in important information being overlooked or lost. GroupLoop is a single interface that integrates all of the functions users require to effectively communicate with each of their groups. Users can send private or group messages, access contact information for each group member, upload shared multimedia, add events in a group calendar, and participate in forums. They can even view information for multiple groups at once. Feedback from GroupLoop users who have tested these functions in order to communicate with their groups have found it to be “helpful,” “convenient,” and “a service they would like to use.”