iSchool Capstone

2024

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A Gentle Bibliographic Madness: Cataloging and Digitizing the Journal of the Book Club of Washington

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.
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A Window To Seattle’s Music History: Improving Access to the Ladies Musical Club’s Archives

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.
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Accessibility in Reader Services: Obtaining a Reader Card at The Huntington Library

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.
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Accessing Memory: Preparing a Digital Archive for Vanport Mosaic

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.
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Archive Expansion Through Oral Histories

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.
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Archiving Materials on the University of Washington Gender Identity Clinic

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.
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Bookmaking as Collaboration: Archiving the Broken Moon Press Collection

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.
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Bringing Southeast Asian Digital Archives to Life: A Digital Humanities Exhibit Featuring Publications from French Colonial Indochina

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.
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Camano City Schoolhouse Archive

Camano Island has a lot of incredible history and a lot of people who are interested in it but, until recently, had nowhere to connect the two. The Camano City Schoolhouse Archive solves an information need for historians and genealogists on the island, as well as local people who have historic materials they want to donate. We’ve been able to establish the archive, build procedures, and train volunteers so archival work can continue for decades. Now, our space is open for any researcher, and our digital collection is growing every week - which connects people with Camano’s varied history.
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Catching Smoke in a Bottle: Fandom, Community, and the Digital Space

In the realm of amateur fan archiving, the digital preservation of its fanfiction is held paramount. However, fanfiction is the natural result of its hosting platform, and it is crucial to consider this in its preservation. Through exploring both the history of the tenuous digital space of fan communities and its fanfiction terminology, this series of blog posts reveals three potential solutions to the natural difficulties of preserving context and space: introductions, disclaimers, and emulation. This project can function as a complement to the work of fan archivists to ensure that their efforts are as complete as is feasible.