iSchool Capstone

2024

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Bringing Southeast Asian Digital Archives to Life: A Digital Humanities Exhibit Featuring Publications from French Colonial Indochina

This digital humanities project presents a selection of digitized French and Vietnamese-language books, published between 1920 and 1937 in Vietnam, when Vietnam was part of French colonial Indochina. The books are contained in the Indochina Collection of Robert Jones III at University of Washington Libraries. The exhibit seeks to 'bring these books to life' by introducing the publishing houses that created them, and providing context about the authors and publishers involved in their creation. This project demonstrates how curated digital humanities exhibits can provide context and interpretation to interest new users in digital collections and improve archival access for all.
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Building a Digital Framework for The Critical Hope and Black Life Archive

This project addresses the need for discoverable and accessible archival materials about Black histories at Occidental College. In the last decade, Oxy students increasingly utilize archival study and the digital humanities to advance their research and progress student movements. The College’s archive is rich with materials, but access is limited due to slow processes towards digitization, lack of finding guides, and loss of digital exhibits. Using Collection Builder, this project builds a framework for a sustainable, publicly accessible digital archive that benefits its target audience and presents a replicable model for other affinity organizations and community archives.
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Building a Trauma-Informed Workplace to Support Library Staff

Our capstone project works to address the issue of unaddressed public library staff trauma through a paper and website. These texts overview public library workers’ experience of trauma, defines trauma-informed care, examines its use within the public library setting, and provides strategies to incorporate those principles for public library staff support. Our project serves to educate library staff and the public about the experiences of library workers and as a call to action to incorporate trauma-informed practices into library staff support so that library staff wellbeing is prioritized.
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Camano City Schoolhouse Archive

Camano Island has a lot of incredible history and a lot of people who are interested in it but, until recently, had nowhere to connect the two. The Camano City Schoolhouse Archive solves an information need for historians and genealogists on the island, as well as local people who have historic materials they want to donate. We’ve been able to establish the archive, build procedures, and train volunteers so archival work can continue for decades. Now, our space is open for any researcher, and our digital collection is growing every week - which connects people with Camano’s varied history.
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Care and Community Toward Climate Disaster Resilience

This project evaluated Marshall County Public Library’s response to the December 2021 tornado in Western Kentucky. The primary deliverable was a revised tornado response plan for use at the library. Secondary deliverables included a crisis response taxonomy suggestion for the Marshall County Public library website, and a general framework for consideration in climate disaster planning. The Cycle of Disaster Planning and trauma-informed solutions presented here are a synthesis of information gathered about Marshall County Public Library, as well as current disaster management literature.
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Cataloging Community Stakeholders

The “Cataloging Community Stakeholders” allows WCLS staff to catalog information on significant relationships with key community stakeholders in Whatcom County. Staff members can input contact information for community stakeholders, as well as basic information about the organizations, areas of expertise, or topics that they represent. The project took the form of an Airtable where information about key community stakeholders is housed and searched based on criteria determined by WCLS staff. This tool supports outreach and relationship building between WCLS and the Whatcom County Community by centralizing information and easing the burden for new and veteran staff collaborating with community partners.
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Catching Smoke in a Bottle: Fandom, Community, and the Digital Space

In the realm of amateur fan archiving, the digital preservation of its fanfiction is held paramount. However, fanfiction is the natural result of its hosting platform, and it is crucial to consider this in its preservation. Through exploring both the history of the tenuous digital space of fan communities and its fanfiction terminology, this series of blog posts reveals three potential solutions to the natural difficulties of preserving context and space: introductions, disclaimers, and emulation. This project can function as a complement to the work of fan archivists to ensure that their efforts are as complete as is feasible.
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Characteristics of International Interlibrary Loaning

This capstone project wanted to determine characteristics of materials shared internationally by libraries’ interlibrary loan (ILL) departments, seeking to determine drivers behind such resource sharing and whether any interesting or useful patterns in the practice could be identified. By interviewing institutions who participate in international ILL, we found that the experience, and number of resources shared by the participants varied greatly and were the result of differing circumstances. It was determined that participants faced similar challenges the world over, but that the responsibility ILL teams feel to their users to provide the best access to resources is universal.
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Chīmu: Improving Team Dynamics to Make Projects Efficient, Collaborative, and Fun

Students who work in team projects often experience issues such as poor communication and a lack of accountability. Chīmu aims to reduce negative team experiences by emphasizing communication, responsibility, and feedback. The goal is to start a conversation by providing awareness that issues are occurring. Chīmu does this through critical features that allow teams to understand each other and build trust, set clear expectations, and encourage reflection for building continuous improvements. Chīmu strives to facilitate teamwork that creates a safe environment for students and promotes working through issues in a constructive manner.
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Clarice Francone Digital Archive

This Capstone Project focuses on an archive on medical illustrator Clarice Francone. Though this collection has been unavailable to search and view online and required extensive reprocessing. Over the course of this year, I was able to rehouse and rearrange the archive, incorporate new accessions and create a digitized, searchable repository of Francone’s works available for public online viewing. With the completion of this project, a vast collection of historical, scientific and artistic merit is now significantly more accessible.