The Tutankhamun Centenary: 1922 – 2022 website hosts a collection of Howard Carter’s personal documents and articles from the Times of London describing the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The wealth of information related here had been out of public view for the past 100 years, so this project sought to make these documents accessible to both academics and the curious public. We learned how to use digital tools and platforms to create an online archive; we learned how to document,preserve, and present historical materials; we created metadata and a keyword list; and we integrated our archive into an interactive timeline.

This project aims to assess and revise the crowded library space at Dearborn Park International Elementary School, where students had difficulty finding materials. After completing a space and collection assessment to pinpoint areas of concern, over 1,200 books were weeded, and a revision plan was constructed. Additionally, a survey, focus group prompts, and a participatory design activity was created to include students in the revision process and to help foster a strong relationship with the library. These actions will help produce a library space that improves the students' ability to navigate and access the library and its collection.

Volunteers are an integral part to most non-profit organizations, but often these organizations don’t have the resources to build a sustainable volunteer program. The Volunteer Sustainability Toolkit provides a guide to help onboard and train volunteers while maintaining the volunteer program, regardless of organizational turnover.

In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Washington State Library collected data on service disruptions across the state’s public libraries. We have built on this effort by curating, enriching, and tidying the information in this dataset — adding variables to transform it into a time series, filling in missing values, and archiving the digital sources we referenced for each observation. Our curated dataset and supporting materials, published on the Washington State open data portal, will serve as a comprehensive record to shed light on this historical moment and inform future research and emergency response planning.

This project supported the Washington State Library with weeding the Anytime Library, an online library with over 66,000 titles. The library supports a consortium of public and tribal libraries in Washington State. A literature review was conducted to determine best practice for weeding online libraries. The findings discovered that weeding an online library is not the same as weeding a physical library. As a result, new guidelines were developed and used in the project. The team also developed an evaluation tool and process guide. Only part of the collection was evaluated due to the large size of the collection.

This project sought to identify queer books in a public library's young adult collection and evaluate the various representations, including BIPOC and disabled representation, as well as determine if the tagging system is effective. Utilizing the library's online catalog, Amanda identified nearly 100 materials published from January 2020 through March 2022 within the library's YA collection, with the majority having some kind of BIPOC representation.

Library of Congress Subject Headings perpetuate the biases of the sources used to establish them. For Indigenous and other peoples, standard research practices using written reference sources may result in subject terms that do not reflect what people call themselves or wish to be called. Changing our approach to gathering and prioritizing information can result in more ethical and accurate representation of people and peoples in library catalogs.

We acknowledge that librarianship is subjective, but subjectivity invites potential for artistry, esotericism, provocation which I feel is sorely underexplored. My project encompasses four works of library art - art which critically and creatively engages with the theory, practice, politics, culture, technology, and mechanics of libraries and information. My work includes exploratory information technology and design experiments and ideological messaging, but above all it is art, aimed at intangible enrichment of the self and others.

The Washington Talking Book and Braille Library (WTBBL) needs diverse collections in order to meet its users’ needs. In order to expose gaps in WTBBL’s holdings, our team conducted a diversity audit of the young adult collection. We found that the authors and main characters in the collection are overwhelmingly white, cisgender, and heterosexual. We recommended ways to make the collection more representative of Washington’s population and improve the library’s subject headings. With these recommendations and the data to justify them, WTBBL will be better equipped to serve its users with diverse, representative collections.

This project was focused on exploring what libraries are doing to serve people experiencing homelessness - and if there is more that the Sacramento Public Library can do to address the issue of homelessness in their communities. A literature review, Sacramento-specific report, and accompanying slide deck were created as tools and references for staff at this organization; these and our recommendations will hopefully lead to additional services and direct impacts to those experiencing homelessness on the streets and shelters in Sacramento and beyond.