Working for the Book Club of Washington, a bibliophile society dedicated to book collecting and book arts, I created an online public access catalog for the organization's independently published periodical, the Journal of the Book Club of Washington. To do so, I used LibraryThing to create bibliographic records for over 300 of the Journal's articles from its debut in 2000 to Spring 2023. I then organized those records into an OPAC utilizing LibraryThing's TinyCat software. Additionally, I digitized each issue that lacked a digital copy and made the digital versions available to the public via the online catalog.

The Ladies Musical Club (LMC) is Seattle’s oldest arts organization. Founded in 1891, LMC helped establish Seattle as a musical city by giving skilled women musicians a platform for public performance, thrilling audiences with concerts by world-famous musicians, and supporting other Seattle institutions like Cornish College. LMC’s important history is well preserved but can be hard to find. This project aims to improve accessibility to the LMC’s archive by providing a cross-institutional collection guide and enhancing the LMC’s digital archive. These changes offer a clearer window to Seattle’s music history for LMC members, researchers, music fans, and the broader public.

In July of 2021 the Reader Services department at The Huntington Library expanded their access policy, resulting in a more diverse population of patrons. This project aimed to determine what services could be improved or employed to better serve Huntington researchers through an accessibility assessment of the special collections reading room and the online process users must undergo to obtain a reader card. The assessments revealed a need to create intentional space for readers with disabilities, both in person and online. Recommendations included reading room alterations, the implementation of an accommodations request libguide, and updated language throughout the library's website.

Vanport Mosaic is a community archive that preserves memories related to life in Vanport, Oregon, the flood that destroyed the city, and the reverberating legacies of displacement, discrimination, resistance, and resilience that followed. This project addresses Vanport Mosaic’s need to make its content available online by developing a rights and usage policy, designing a metadata schema, and populating descriptive metadata for the collection’s oral history interviews to increase discoverability. Through this work, the marginalized histories in this collection will become discoverable and accessible to the public, making them available to educate, inspire, and advocate for change.

The Alene Moris Women’s Center is historically significant to the University of Washington and the surrounding area. Its archival collections will one day be housed in Special Collections. I added to their repertoire of materials and gained experience with organizing their archival assets by completing oral history interviews with the current director of the Center to document personal stories of the Center's leadership. Additionally, I helped develop a finding aid for the collection. Through the addition of these oral histories and the finding aid, the collection will become more robust and accessible to the community for future research.

In collaboration with UW PhD candidate, Os Keyes, and the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, the Dayton/Hunt Collection preserves and provides access to materials about the University of Washington Gender Identity Clinic. By processing the physical and digital materials, creating a Google-indexed finding aid, and sharing news about the collection at a Special Collections Student Worker Poster Presentation event, future researchers will now have access to information on a foundational clinic in the history of transgender medicine. With this collection, people will learn that transgender people have been receiving gender-affirming medical care for decades within the United States.

In order to increase patron engagement within the Art Library and build outreach guidelines for future projects, I planned, advertised, and executed three different events and created an outreach toolkit for the library. I collaborated with UW Special Collections and a student-run literary journal called Bricolage to engage patrons not familiar with the library and advertise our collections and resources. This project allowed the Art Library to build lasting relationships with different organizations on campus as well as learn best practices for event planning and outreach.

Librarians manually keyword large datasets to enhance information findability in IHME’s catalog. Automating this process could significantly streamline the cataloging workflow. This project documents data characteristics of IHME’s collection to inform an automatic solution. Research revealed that an auto-keywording tool which could process ALL data types would require large investment into a sophisticated computational linguistics solution. This project delivers a practical solution focused on a few specific data types to immediately save Librarians hours of work per data set. The project also provides documentation as lasting evidence for future development and/or funding of a larger Language Learning Model project.

This project was a pilot for collaborative work between Special Collections’ Book Arts & Rare Books and University Archives curatorial areas to accession and steward archival materials pertaining to book and literary arts, beginning with Broken Moon Press (1982-1997)—a small independent trade press publishing international literature. After labor-intensive inventorying, arrangement, description, preservation activities, and records creation, 45 boxes (47.3 linear feet) of materials were accessioned into Special Collections. A comprehensive finding aid was created to guide user access to this now publicly available collection encompassing the Press’s work, the underrepresented creators they collaborated with, and a broader independent press network.

This digital humanities project presents a selection of digitized French and Vietnamese-language books, published between 1920 and 1937 in Vietnam, when Vietnam was part of French colonial Indochina. The books are contained in the Indochina Collection of Robert Jones III at University of Washington Libraries. The exhibit seeks to 'bring these books to life' by introducing the publishing houses that created them, and providing context about the authors and publishers involved in their creation. This project demonstrates how curated digital humanities exhibits can provide context and interpretation to interest new users in digital collections and improve archival access for all.