For this capstone project I partnered with the Breman Museum, a Jewish heritage museum in Atlanta, GA, that is working to broaden their visibility by creating exhibits for the Atlanta roll out of the Google Arts and Culture project. I created two archival exhibits, focused on Jewish human rights advocates, described and uploaded a hundred artifacts to the online collection, and wrote an exhibit creation guide for staff and volunteers. This project brings to light Southern Jewish voices, humanizes the Jewish experience, and stimulates awareness of the collections held by the Breman Museum.

Documents reflect the historical contexts of their creation, and in doing so, become information objects. The serial novel is a type of information object, but due to re-editioning, reversioning, and digitization, most readers have lost touch with its historical significance. This analysis of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849–1850) uses the lens of information theory, in relation to literary criticism, historiography, and the history of the book, to grasp the serial novel as an information object, arguing that doing so requires intimate familiarity with the physical nature of the book in parts and the historical context of its production.

Dr. Ann Huppert and Dr. Pamela O. Long are developing a history of the Church of the Gesù, the first Jesuit church built in Rome. I implemented data organization, performed data entry, and created a Table of Contents for the 16th-century account book. The TOC tracks peoples involved, monetary transactions, materials, and other details relevant to construction that occurred between 1568 and 1581, and establishes a relationship between folio photographs and corresponding pages of the transcription. My work complements the researchers’ architectural and historical expertise, giving them a clearer picture of the construction project and facilitating the capture of data.

For many years, local libraries have been unable to field requests for access to both of Coeur d’Alene’s high schools' yearbooks. The solution has always been to refer patrons to the high school administration. These requests put an added burden on school secretaries and, because of school hours and school holidays, there is limited access throughout the year. Library workers and school administrators will now be able to easily forward requests to cdarchives.org for access to LCHS’s yearbooks. Plans have been created for both the upload of CDHS’s yearbooks and a full marketing campaign.

“Collections as data” (CaD) goes beyond traditional archival practices to analyze cultural heritage collections that support computationally-driven research. We analyzed George Mason University’s (GMU) Special Collections Resource Center’s (SCRC) procedures and metadata, drafted a report for the SCRC, and presented our findings. The team liaised between the SCRC and GMU’s Digital Scholarship Center (DiSC), a stakeholder in CaD initiatives and digital scholarship. This project modified SCRC’s workflows, procedures, and standards, improving accessibility to data-driven digital scholarship. The emerging strategic partnership between the SCRC and DiSC will provide researchers with new opportunities to interact with special collections materials.

Lincoln County Library District was formed to extend city library services to residents of unincorporated regions of Lincoln County. A community profile evaluates the extent of existing rural LCLD library services and their utilization rates. It also establishes population dispersals, best practices for communicating with user groups (including languages and platforms), and capacity for service adjustment or expansion. This profile informed the design of a community feedback campaign including survey questions, modes of distribution, and location targets. The feedback collected will allow for the deliberate allocation of funds and strategic expansion of library services to remote areas of Lincoln County.

Our capstone is for UW's Sephardic Studies Digital Library. It focuses on the research needed for launching a crowdsourced transcription site for the 400+ digitized materials in Ladino, Sephardic Jews' endangered language, housed in their Digital Library. Our goal is to offer a place for the global Sephardic community and researchers to have access to Sephardic cultural heritage. We explored various transcription platforms to write a paper for best practices and created assessment and rubric sheets to better inform our sponsor. This results in the Sephardic Studies Program having the research complete before making design decisions for their transcription platform.

As technology continues to integrate into everyday life, data is becoming a normal part of library staff workflows. However, the technical skills needed to efficiently use this valuable data are not necessarily a part of current library staff training. To help fill this skill gap, two 1.5-hour workshops on Tidy Data and the tool OpenRefine and plans for a third workshop on Python were developed. These workshops introduce best practices for structuring and cleaning data in spreadsheets for further analysis. Using skills learned in these workshops, library staff can work with data more efficiently and finish projects faster and easier.

The Northwest Annual was a yearly exhibition of painting and sculpture by Pacific Northwest artists, hosted by the Seattle Art Museum from 1914 to 1977, and served as a significant cultural event for regional artists. In order to properly manage and promote archival materials about the NWA, a new digital exhibition was created for SAM. This involved digitizing the original checklists, creating descriptive metadata, using OCR to improve search, restoring photographic material, and interviewing local NW art experts. This digital exhibition will now enable online access to these materials, providing rich information for researchers interested in 20th century Northwest art.

This project contributes to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM)’s Historical Media Collection, preserving materials stored in outdated formats. Due to limited resources, the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) lacks a digital preservation plan. A donation of 1,000+ slides, taken to document John Grimes’ cultural tour around Japan from 1987-88 and offering a rare glimpse at the ceremonies, architecture, and exhibits he observed, has remained unprocessed and inaccessible. To preserve and provide access to them, this project involved arranging and describing all 1,000+ slides, digitizing 200+ slides from over 20 geographical locations, and creating an Omeka exhibit for SAM’s Digital Collections.