The mission of UW Special Collections is to provide access to its collections for academic and research purposes while also preserving and maintaining materials for long-term preservation. However, as a public institution with limited funding and staff, UW Special Collections has acquired a number of collections which have not been thoroughly processed, essentially rendering them inaccessible to users. One such collection is the Price/Rodgers Leavenworth Collection, which documents the efforts of Ted Price and Bob Rodgers to transform the Washington town of Leavenworth into a Bavarian village to increase tourism and revitalize its failing economy in the 1960s. My project—the creation of a finding aid—will make this collection both findable and searchable on the Special Collections website, thereby increasing access to the collection for the public, a benefit to both the user and the organization.

Hispanic day laborers are experiencing serious difficulties to seek and maintain the jobs. They have uncertain jobs, very low wages, no benefits or health insurance, limited access and use of information technologies. Casa Latina, our sponsor, is a Seattle-based nonprofit service agency serving the Hispanic community. We would explore the needs and expectations of day laborers in Seattle area and address these needs by building a website that enable networking and manage reputation. This website would help day laborers to show their skills and experiences to potential clients through an easy to use, bilingual (English and Spanish) platform. Clients can also get in touch with the day labors they hope to work for them. In order to make the further profile management easier for Casa Latina staff, we built a user-friendly dashboard which allow further edits according to their needs.

With the influx of children entering elementary school born after 2007 (notably, the year of the first iPhone), it is increasingly important for school libraries to consider the role of electronic materials in the library. Studies have shown that elementary schools across the nation are less likely to provide eBooks to their students. Here in the West, fewer schools offer eBooks than any other region in the United States. We have created a plan for the implementation of an eCollection at Fernwood Elementary School in the Northshore School District (NSD). Together, we will meet the information needs of Fernwood’s students and help this school district move into the digital age—making NSD a model for future schools in the Pacific Northwest. Our students are digital natives. It is time for libraries and schools to address their specific needs and bridge the remaining gap between technology and education. 

In order to generate more information from historical weather and environmental records, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) created the Arctic Rediscovery Project. One initiative of the Arctic Rediscovery Project is the crowdsourcing transcribing website, Old Weather. Old Weather facilitates the digitization and transcription of historical images, logbooks, and documents by dedicated volunteers and students. As a part of their collection, NOAA has thousands of images featuring personnel from the Geodetic Survey, academic institutions, and crew from old research vessels. These images were digitized, but until now the public had no access to the collection. By constructing a searchable and browse-able database and designing a functioning website to display these images, our capstone project creates an access point for NOAA researchers, historians, relatives, and Old Weather volunteers.

Communications, including the sharing of and access to information, is crucial to any organization, especially non-profits that rely on a rotating mix of volunteers, have building space in multiple locations, and the inevitable shortage of paid staff. The Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, a member and donor-centric organization that fundraises and advocates for the library, have struggled greatly with these restraints. A plan to strengthen internal communications by creating digital platforms to access and share information was created. Virtual spaces were designed for all parties involved, enabling staff, volunteers and board members to become proactive and more self-sufficient. Two databases were built: one that eliminated a tedious daily data entry task, and another 26 that keeps track of all of the categories and subjects of donated books, which has tightened the organization’s successful book operations department.

Over the past year the Information School’s Communications Department has experienced an increased ingestion of digital photographic material; these images, which total over 5,000, were being stored on an internal network drive with no standardized naming, organizational schema structure, or embedded metadata information. As these images are imperative in promoting the iSchool’s accomplishments, achievements, advances, and offerings—in a variety of print and digital media sources—the Communications Department sought to create a digital asset management system. By fashioning hierarchal structures, naming and taxonomy standards, and metadata templates, all of which are compatible with Adobe products, I was able to create a digital asset management system and organizational structure that is mindful of its current and future users. Ultimately, this will allow for the photographic content to be more easily accessible all while stimulating workflow and collaboration in promoting the iSchool brand. How are your digital assets working for you?

Seattle based radio station KEXP, a renowned music discovery powerhouse, acts as a launching pad for artists and as a go-to source for music enthusiasts worldwide. This reputation has been achieved despite their library and archives remaining in underdeveloped information silos without a unified approach or management system. To address this problem KEXP is investing in a new media asset management system to act as a central place where all assets can be ingested, processed, stored, indexed, searched and accessed. This project aims to ease access and bring curator and listener discovery to new and previously unimagined levels by developing a metadata schema capable of encompassing the entire collection. With the schema complete, focus can shift to an ingest plan for KEXP’s collections and an automated, human-supervised, metadata cleanup process. These efforts will improve user experiences, yield new insights into the collection and unlock value currently dormant in the library.

The Bellingham Public Library offers community connection through programs, but the experience is fleeting. Patrons repeatedly request recordings of library events. Lives Change @ Your Library is a pilot program that digitally captures patron interviews so that people can access this local oral history at any time through the library website. Interviews focus on how libraries have transformed the lives of eight library patrons. Outreach and interviews occurred over three months. Patrons were all volunteers with an age range of twenty-one to eighty-seven. Four men and four women participated. Some of the topics raised were homelessness, adoption, physical disability, loss of a spouse, loss of a job, finding work, being inspired, and being empowered to find one’s own answers. It’s a way for patrons to share patron created content with each other as well as providing data to library staff members on what resources might be required for future projects.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) offers free online access to over 5.5 million images and other records from organizations throughout America. With such a rich collection, discovering and contextualizing material on specific topics can be difficult for users. Our participation in the DPLA Digital Curation Pilot, creating a digital collection titled Religion in America Since 1900, will provide the DPLA with a high-quality addition to their topic-based access points. We developed a collection in Omeka using both materials from the DPLA and other digital resources as appropriate. We researched copyright status, shaped records into larger stories and themes, and developed accompanying text for the images. If selected by the DPLA, the final product will offer users an additional access point to locate material of interest, highlight historically important content from the DPLA’s partners, and support the DPLA’s goal of providing a portal for public discovery.