Space Needle, LLC is seeking a move to a greener and more efficient electronic billing, invoicing, and records sharing system within the organization, with ability to share outside the organization. The company was seeking a digital process and invoice approval system to convert manual entry and workflow procedures and replace the antiquated format and practices already in place. This Capstone investigated emerging industry technologies surrounding electronic receiving, invoicing, and workflow with particular consideration of processes in document management and department budgeting and approval. Project impact includes elimination of misplaced files or invoices, instant document retrieval and sharing across the company, and a fit with the company’s new Green Initiatives Mission.

Callison Architecture specializes in designing built environments, including projects in retail, hospitality, healthcare, and mixed-use. Headquartered in Seattle, it employs over 1,000 architects, designers and support staff worldwide. Yet despite its large size and the complexity of its projects, Callison has never centralized its project information into a single dedicated location. Recognizing the opportunity to assist in knowledge organization efforts, this project captures and collects data that is a) currently scattered across various internal servers or b) has remained unrecorded. This carefully curated data is critical in launching the beta mode of Callison’s first project database. As a master repository of project information, the database presents a quick snapshot of any given project within the firm. This is essential in saving the time of the architects and the staff who support them and, on a broader level, ensuring that the institutional knowledge of the firm’s forty-year history is preserved in one authoritative location.

With over 400 permanently sited artworks in their collection, the Office of Arts & Culture has advanced Seattle’s reputation as a cultural center for innovation and creativity. Increasing accessibility to this unique cultural collection introduces a new audience to the collective history of the artworks and the history of Seattle. One of the ways this has been achieved is by showcasing artworks on the Public Art Archive, a national online database of public artworks. By designing a digital curation of content from the collection, the artworks can be used for educational purposes, research, and artistic inspiration. The curation of art objects included preparation and organization into an established dataset. Each object entry includes information about location, description, artist statements, and images. Digital curation of this collection demonstrates how to provide a framework for collection accessibility while highlighting how the Office of Arts & Culture has invested in public art.

Howard Clifford, a photographer for the Tacoma News Tribune and Pacific Northern Airlines, donated to the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Division a large collection of his life's work spanning the 1930s to the 1960s. In the 1970s when a portion of the collection was donated, items were commonly dispersed into general subject files, robbing researchers of the important context only a complete collection provides. My efforts to re-establish the collection’s original integrity through archival processing are resulting in new physical and intellectual arrangement and description as well as digitization of items for access on the UW Libraries’ Digital Collections website. Not only will a comprehensive finding aid provide detailed narrative descriptions, but for the first time, researchers will be able to see Clifford's photographs from anywhere in the world.

The Elmer Ogawa Photograph collection is a large and mostly untouched collection of photographs by Elmer Ogawa, a Japanese-American photographer and native Seattleite. Many of Ogawa’s photographs document local Seattle history and social scenes during the mid-twentieth century. The collection has been inventoried but has not been fully appraised and only partly digitized. The project team focused on making the Elmer Ogawa Photograph collection manageable for future development and continued digitization. Through weeding extraneous photographs, assessing the collection for content, and adjusting the finding aid to reflect alterations, the team was able to refine and cultivate the collection. Completion of this project has allowed the University of Washington Special Collections Library to reallocate resources and storage space to other projects while making the Elmer Ogawa Photograph collection easier to maintain, digitize and showcase to the public.

On Saturday March 22, 2014 the communities of Darrington and Oso, Washington experienced the devastating effects of a massive landslide that destroyed property and resulted in the loss of 43 lives. Recognizing the historical significance of this event, the Darrington Historical Society (DHS) quickly began collecting artifacts and information related to the slide. Identified as a priority by DHS was the need to build an archive that was widely available to the public, helped the community to heal, and also had the potential to aid scientific research and rescue operations planning. Toward this end, our Capstone team worked closely with DHS and UW Special Collections to create a digital archive using the CONTENTdm platform. By creating a digital archive searchable via WorldCat, DHS ensures that the Darrington and Oso communities, general public, and research community can continue to access images, documents, maps, videos, and audio recordings associated with the landslide.

Since 2007, Capital Stage has produced the Playwrights’ Revolution: a theater series of staged readings for six unproduced plays, inviting artist and audience feedback for playwrights. The series now receives up to 300 script submissions each year. To address the high volume of submissions, I developed a structured process for shepherding submissions from script to stage that is responsive to the company’s needs. The process includes a script catalog, a scoring rubric for script reviews, and coordinating volunteer readers to ensure all submissions receive equal consideration. This project creates a tested script management process that is scalable to growth of the Playwrights’ Revolution series and transferable to other script management projects. There are not currently industry standards for managing submissions, although there is a recognized need for better organizational strategies. This process uses tools that are already familiar to users, and could be easily implemented by other small theater companies.

Splaces is the first, tour-centric UW Android app that allows users to explore 154 years of the university’s rich and gritty history. This project revamps the existing three-part Spaces and Places campus tour, originally created by the UW Office of the University Architect (OUA). Historically, Spaces and Places was limited to being available as an online PDF, phone tree, and placard. Now, with Splaces, all of those are accessible in the palm of your hand. Maps, routes, and points of interest are hosted by the UW Capital Projects Office (CPO). By using their geographic information systems (GIS) we hope to show the potential of having a centralized, sustainable infrastructure for location-based data, and set a precedent for other groups and departments to follow. We would like to give special thanks to our partners at the CPO and OUA for helping make this project possible.

The Digital Public Library of America is a super-aggregator of metadata with over one million digital items available to the public, made possible through a content hub/partnership model. Digitized content from an extensive, nationwide network of small regional institutions and large digital libraries is accessible to end users through a single access point: the DPLA homepage. Through Omeka -- the online content management and digital exhibition platform -- and in accordance to DPLA guidelines, our team designed an exhibit based on the subject of Cartography composed of four sub-sections, called themes. Each theme uses high-quality images telling stories of struggles for power, scrambles for land, and desires for tangible knowledge of a vast and exciting new world. Through extensive research, rigorous editorial decisions, and meticulous metadata entry, we curated an informative, visually engaging collection highlighting forty incredible images available through the Digital Public Library of America.

The University of Washington Special Collections Library received a request from a Japanese author who was searching for archival photographs to accompany his forthcoming book on Douglas MacArthur. The author was specifically looking for photographs that linked MacArthur to American Freemasonic orders in Asia. He needed to know what Special Collections photographs were available related to the topic and detailed information about them including dates, locations and names of individuals. Confronted with thousands of unprocessed photographs, I organized the collection in accordance with the Special Collections archival process of arrangement, description and access creation. Through processing the photographs and some detective work, the author’s information needs were met. By the end of the project, 15 photographs were discovered that directly related the Seattle Nile Shrine organization to MacArthur’s subordinate officers in Japan in the 1950’s.