The roots of Lost Sounds Montana can be traced to a Havre, MT, basement with the discovery of a box containing long-forgotten seven-inch records. These rediscovered musical treasures are cause for great excitement among music lovers, but it is not only aficionados who benefit from the unearthed gems. The recordings, posters, interviews, and ephemera of the Lost Sounds archive offer a glimpse of a bygone era and the cultural and regional happenings that informed it. My project creates a taxonomy and metadata schema that will benefit the people of Montana, cultural historians, and music fans alike. By facilitating the inclusion of the collection in multiple digital environments, as well as a dedicated Lost Sounds Montana website, the potential audience grows exponentially. This interoperable schema prepares the collection for future growth and will aid targeted finding, while encouraging and fostering serendipitous discovery.

Many of us today use multiple forms of social media like Facebook and Twitter. But as of now, we do not have an environment online that lets us conveniently record our memories and relive them later on in the future. Though services like Facebook attempt to do this, their focus is to connect people through social networking instead of storing memories. So our team has come up with a new website called Mmentos, where the main focus is for people to record the precious moments of their lives and to go back and relive them in the future. Whether it is photos, videos, words, or even Tweets, Mmentos lets people organize their keepsakes neatly online and lets them share these moments with their loved ones later on in the future. Because Mmentos has a simple and clean interface, people will be able to easily store their memories and show them off to loved ones for years to come.

As project manager for the Newspace Library Cataloging Project, I planned, organized and cataloged the Newspace Center for Photography’s growing library with the OPALS cataloging system.  The Library includes more than seven hundred physical objects from photography monographs, to anthologies, criticisms, histories, serials, and DVDs.  This process included using the MARC cataloging standard, creating a how-to manual, and a weekly blog post to highlight materials in the Library. The Catalog can now be searched either at the Center or online and the materials have all had subject listings added to make finding those materials much easier.  The blog is also continuing to draw online attention to Newspace Center for Photography and its Library.

Permazine, the Holdout Digital Zine Library Project, was born out of a collective desire to not only capture and archive valuable cultural information while maintaining the integrity of the zine medium, but also due to a significant need for increased accessibility to cultural and political information. Accessible on the web, its use is promoted through the center’s very popular free-use computers. A notable feature of this library built on the Drupal CMS platform is that its content is constructed not only by the Holdout Bookstore Collective and its volunteers, but also by a greater community of organizations and individuals who have something to contribute - its content is a reflection of community-wide interests. Paramount to the Holdout Digital Zine Library Project’s success is that it reflects an understanding the impact that the digital divide and information inequality have on the library’s significance, accessibility and use.

Permazine, the Holdout Digital Zine Library Project, was born out of a collective desire to not only capture and archive valuable cultural information while maintaining the integrity of the zine medium, but also due to a significant need for increased accessibility to cultural and political information. Accessible on the web, its use is promoted through the center’s very popular free-use computers. A notable feature of this library built on the Drupal CMS platform is that its content is constructed not only by the Holdout Bookstore Collective and its volunteers, but also by a greater community of organizations and individuals who have something to contribute - its content is a reflection of community-wide interests. Paramount to the Holdout Digital Zine Library Project’s success is that it reflects an understanding the impact that the digital divide and information inequality have on the library’s significance, accessibility and use.

In the past decade, the construction industry has been transformed by the use of on-site technology for maximizing efficiency, communication, and data storage.  But one aspect of every project remains under served: the close out, or what the industry calls the “punch” process.   This is the process of identifying every aspect of a project, down to the smallest detail, that needs attention or repair before the building is turned over to the clients. Historically, creating a punch-list is a labor intensive, paper-based process that involves one or more individuals inspecting the new construction, making notes about incomplete or damaged components and then assigning a resource to attend to it. To alleviate this burdensome activity we have created a mobile application that allows construction workers to create, update, sort, view, archive and complete punch-list items on a tablet pc or android phone. Punch-n-Done offers prequalified lists of building components with easy point and click features to help the end user efficiently capture and organize information to distribute to the appropriate resource for completion.

Youth librarians are uniquely able to encourage cultural awareness in the populations they serve. Despite increasing emphasis on cultural competence for librarians, many library science programs have no requirement for such training and librarians have never received instruction in cultural competency. The MAP project seeks to create a central hub for librarians to receive training and to access materials and resources that will provide a culturally rich and welcoming environment in libraries.

The Seattle Public Library’s Special Collections has done a fantastic job of preserving Seattle’s local history, but one of Seattle’s mainstays, its music, has yet to be addressed. This project broke new ground for Seattle Public Library by establishing a foundation for preserving audio recordings as part of the library’s special collections and providing the framework for building a collection in years to come. In addition to writing a collection scope statement, Dylan Joy and Dave Zelonka examined the issues of preservation, copyright, and access in regards to collecting archival audio material and tested a pilot collection. Now equipped with the necessary tools, the Seattle Public Library is closer to providing access to the art and history of Seattle’s jazz music than ever before.

The Museum of Flight Library’s technical files cover everything from aviation history to aircraft technical specifications. The collection’s depth and breadth makes it a potential source of tremendous value. Even noted historians have found materials within their areas of expertise that they did not know existed. However, neglect and disorganization have resulted in underuse. Finding things can be so difficult that researchers tend to avoid using the technical file collection. We analyzed the state of the collection and interviewed its primary users to determine their needs. We made recommendations for reorganizing and maintaining the files, and began implementing the changes. Most importantly, we left the library a procedures manual and other documentation to complete the project and keep the collection usable in the future.

University Advancement drives private support for the UW by fostering strong relationships with donors, and this means keeping donors informed on matters of interest and importance to them. To better provide such information – and improve stewardship of benefactors at all levels – Advancement is developing an online donor portal. We have researched and recommended a plan for pulling news content from multiple sources throughout the university and delivering personalized news to donors in this portal. We identified different news sources, determined the technical capability of each to feed its content to the portal, and performed content audits and analyses. We also assembled a set of tags for indexing this content which facilitates the dynamic selection of items for donors based on their interests and affiliations.