Books in prisons have proven to be beneficial for the economic and mental well-being of prisoners.  However, budgets for prison libraries in the United States have been drastically cut over the past decades, even as prison populations swell.  Books to Prisoners is a Seattle-based non-profit that provides free books to prisoners across the country; it operates on donated time, books, and money to fill the 1,200 requests sent every month.  Due to its limited resources, the organization has never created an inventory of book donations or prisoner requests to assess its own needs.  This project sampled and analyzed the content of donated books and prisoner letters.  This information was used to determine the most critical service gaps and contact appropriate publishers to solicit targeted book donations.  Books to Prisoners is now better prepared to request donations, write grants, and support a national population facing dire information shortages.

Being productive and managing your schedule is difficult, more importantly time management shouldn’t take up more of what little time you already have.  Our team has built a smart scheduling app we like to call COG, which takes the existing events in your Google calendar and finds places you can fit in items from a task list you have created. Implementing the idea of smart scheduling means COG also learns from your scheduling patterns (overestimating time, frequented locations, recurring events) and refactoring those observations to create an even more accurate plan for you, even when you might not realize you could be more efficient. Finally, COG is a way for people to build self-awareness about their own scheduling habits and how they manage their time. Through preliminary user testing we have found that COG is not only beneficial but “quickly becomes an everyday part of [a user’s] life.

The Clark Memorial Library at the University of Portland underwent a major renovation beginning in May 2012 and the library collection was moved to an interim location.  In the new building, the bulk of the physical collection will be located in user-accessible compact shelving.  This project guides the transition of the collection from the interim location to the compact shelving units in the new building.  In order to avoid ongoing collection shifting in the future, the shelving plan was designed based on the anticipated growth of the collection, with larger gaps in subject areas with higher than average expected growth.  The shelving plan will guide the movers as they return the collection to the renovated building in June 2013.

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.

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.

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.”

Websites that provide volunteering and donating opportunities often lack a centralized hub for communicating, displaying, and tracking the progress of service projects.  Most organizations have a way of keeping track of projects internally; however, with underserved communities, there may be a lack of resources to enable the efficient monitoring of project development and to obtain expertise on a project topic.  Imara is a web platform that promotes a social and collaborative atmosphere allowing volunteers, community members, donors and subject matter experts to exchange knowledge and contribute up-to-date information on the progress of projects.  This information allows project members to identify areas that need more resources, funding, expertise, or volunteer effort.  Users who evaluated Imara stated that it delivers a simple, informative, and engaging way to get involved with service projects.

In 1997 the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, acquired the private library of the institution’s founder, Dominique de Menil. Since then the library has been housed in an offsite location which makes staff access to it inconvenient and public access impossible. Consisting of about 1,500 items, the library had no formal list or inventory nor was the library publicized. Working with the Menil Collection Library I increased the usability and accessibility of the private library by conducting an inventory and creating searchable finding aid. Now Menil staff, scholars, and visitors will be able to discover what is in the founder’s library including many items found nowhere else in the U.S. This finding aid will also help the librarian manage the special collection.

LOCAL COLOR is a retrospective exhibit of watercolor paintings by Parker McAllister currently housed in the Seattle Public Library's Special Collections. My project is a comprehensive exhibit plan and handbook containing an interpretative checklist of the exhibit materials, including a selection of 17 paintings and other materials from the library collection; information about the artist and The Seattle Sunday Times Magazine series for which the paintings were created; painting conservation details; and marketing and programming suggestions. By contrasting the historical personages and events in McAllister's artwork with primary and secondary sources from the library's collection, this exhibit highlights the materials available to the Seattle public about the early history of the Pacific Northwest, and creates space for community dialogue about our history and its portrayal in interpretative art upon which the library can build.