To provide its members with award-winning care, Group Health employees need access to data. This includes electronic Personal Health Information (ePHI) which is distributed throughout the company-wide scheme of network folders. To safeguard ePHI, Group Health administrators have to determine who needs access to this data and at what level. For our Capstone, we joined the Identity and Access Management Department at Group Health, where we led the File Folder Access Review process. During our 5-month engagement, we helped 60 Group Health leaders identify appropriate access among employees to ePHI data. To accomplish this, we conducted gap analysis research, refined existing review structures, and deployed access reviews of 1000+ network folders. Through our project, we ensured effective access to data in compliance with Healthcare Information Portability and Privacy Act (HIPPA) regulations, ultimately decreasing security risks for the entire Cooperative, patients and employees alike.

Sharks are enormously important to our ecosystem, yet poorly understood. Researchers seek to understand and study them but are hampered by siloing, wasted research opportunities, and underdeveloped collaborative networks. Shark Share Global is a website and database that facilitates sample sharing and collaboration between researchers around the world. It is custom-built to encompass the needs of researchers- bringing the technology solution as close to their existing processes of sample cataloguing as possible- to ensure a low barrier to adoption. Open only to accredited shark and ray researchers, it is a simple, elegant solution to a sprawling problem, introducing a formal research collaborative tool where none have existed before.

The Tseltal Maya are an Indigenous people living in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico who are inheritors of a rich Mayan culture but experience extreme poverty. One of the many challenges they face is the loss of language and culture in the face of encroaching globalization and assimilation into the Mestizo culture. The Tseltal House of Wisdom will hold what will be the world's largest collection of Tseltal language materials. However, the current conditions in which the materials are stored, as well as a jungle environment, present the difficult task of organization and preservation. Through a partnership with the One Equal Heart Foundation, we traveled to Chiapas to assess their newly constructed building and collection to offer recommendations for Collection Development, Classification, Environmental Controls, and Technology. We hope the Tseltal House of Wisdom grows into a vital resource for the community as they continue to strengthen their language and culture.

I partnered with the Yakima Valley Libraries (YVL) in order to assess and evaluate their Spanish-language collection and how they select for that collection. Around the United States and Canada, there has been a trend of low number of library materials in Spanish even when the community in which the public library serves has a significant Spanish speaking population. There are many interwoven factors as to why this occurs including funding and community interest. YVL has made extraordinary strides in improving their general collection development and want to continue to improve their Spanish-language materials and services. My project provides an evaluation of how well their existing Spanish-language materials are circulating and suggestions on how to improve the collection in order to better serve their Spanish speaking community.

Spokin is an experimental online civic network created by the non-profit research and development organization, Third Place Technologies. Spokin’s purpose is to allow users to connect with organizations, projects, events and many other happenings that they believe that they are connected to within their communities. This is where our specific capstone project comes into play. Our project is to use a JavaScript visualization library called D3 that will allow us to create a way of visualizing the connection between different people and organizations in the Spokin user network. This will allow their audience to be able find new users and organizations to connect with by looking at how their current connections compare to others.

The Wilhelm Hester Photography Collection is a vital resource for both maritime and local historians, as well as a valuable asset to UW Special Collections. Unfortunately, as is frequently the case in large academic institutions, time constraints and financial pressures mean that the initial processing was basic, resulting in a poor-quality finding aid and inadequate document housing. Improper housing placed the photographs at risk from acidification and mechanical damage, whilst the inadequate finding aid dramatically reduced their accessibility. Our sponsor decided to completely restructure the collection and asked our team for help. We laid the foundation for this project by rehousing over 300 photographs and revamping the online description with enhanced metadata for a more intuitive user experience. Our work will transform the user’s first point of contact f into a gateway for collection discovery, enhancing its usability and maximizing our university’s contribution to research.

Trek.fm is an expansive podcast network of over 20 different podcasts that cover every corner of the Star Trek universe and beyond. Since 2010 the network has been consistently growing as thousands of listeners download Trek.fm podcasts each month to engage in fun, engaging, and thought-provoking discussions with other listeners. My project is focused on increasing the accessibility of the Trek.fm website. I cultivated data on the core series-focused podcasts on the network and developed a tagging system to better serve the users needs. This tagging system will make it easier for hosts to understand how to tag their own content in the future to keep the website cohesive as it grows. There are also new dedicated lists and guides for each show to act as a reference for listeners browsing for content as well. With this project Trek.fm is more accessible to both search queries and browsing.

Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) Publishing Print cataloging has a long and standardized tradition to draw from, but with the emergence of interactive media, the same standards do not translate. The GAMER (Game Research) Group, led by University of Washington’s Jin Ha Lee, has been actively creating a schema called the Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) that captures concepts that are important to those who research video games. Our project will make this schema publicly available and understandable to all who would like to implement it. It will be especially useful for catalogers, metadata specialists, and information architects working with interactive media. In addition to publishing the VGMS, we are creating a publishing toolkit for future use as the schema is still an evolving project for the GAMER Group.

Hillel UW maintains a small library (currently roughly 1600 volumes), but lacked any inventory record or formal policies. Our team used LibraryThing to catalog the collection and create a searchable online catalog with bibliographic information, subject tags, and appropriate classification, while reorganizing and weeding the collection as we went. We also worked with Hillel staff to draft a collection development policy that formalized the library’s subject scope, gift policy, and criteria for future collection building and weeding. Together, the catalog and reorganization improve access to the collection for those who wish to use the library as a research resource and for Hillel staff and community members’ daily needs. The collection development policy provides a formalized statement of procedural expectations for staff working with the library, which will increase the consistency of their application and clarify library needs for staff and members of the public interested in contributing to the library.