This project sought to support the work of the librarians at Lakeside School Upper School, a private high school in Seattle, WA. The librarians needed to find a solution to a decrease in time available to devote to direct instruction pertaining the use of the many databases that the library purchases for access by its students. The Capstone team, in order to help solve this problem, created 31 video-based user guides on how to use 11 different databases, as well as videos devoted to general database use instruction (i.e. search strategies, keywords, etc.).

The youth across King County are rampantly being exposed to age-restricted products like Marijuana, Tobacco, Vapes etc. To address the issue, we partnered with King County and built a computer vision model that analyzes the storefront images of age-restricted retailers and categorizes them into different groups based on advertisement aggressiveness or intensity. The advertisement intensity groups are classified as ‘High’, ‘Medium’, and ‘Low’. The results will help recommend suitable actions to create a safer advertising space. This will also enable various regulatory bodies to create awareness among the youth and bring necessary policy reforms to prevent unhealthy advertising.

We have created an intuitive and user-centric community platform that is centered on anonymity and story sharing. Serenify provides a safe space for users to discuss mental health concerns and ways to support each other. Most importantly, the platform is designed with simple user interfaces and fun interactions. The project goal is to build an online space for users to feel a sense of community around mental health issues with regard to daily prompts. Users can post text, pictures, and videos as responses to the daily prompts.

Last year, SGS, a private, nonprofit middle school, moved into its permanent home, along with a collection of 2,000 books and no library staff. The library presented many challenges, namely an uncataloged fiction collection, a nonexistent circulation system, and an overwhelming lack of student engagement. Together with my sponsor and four students, I developed the Student Librarianship Program, cataloged 775 fiction books, established a check out process, and celebrated our progress with the entire school. SGS’s community of 170 students and staff now have a library they can use and a renewed sense of excitement about its continued evolution.

Working with the Whitman County Historical Society to help them discover what specific surplus materials they have in storage, I inventoried over five hundred individual items while creating a directory of potential new homes for those materials that fell out of the Society’s scope and flagging those that might be considered for integration into their collection. In conjunction with an interactive PowerPoint presentation, this project allows the Society to easily find and access these materials, with the end-goal of opening up storage space and moving on surplus materials to organizations that will recognize and utilize their full informational potential.

The high cost of traditional education and career-switching makes it challenging for people to break into the tech industry. Smash is a startup that addresses this problem by providing underserved learners with accessible project-based learning opportunities. Our platform allows users to get paid by participating in projects from leading tech companies, personalize their learning experience with surveys, and track their progress with a dashboard and auto-filled resume. Our mission is to help learners acquire in-demand tech skills to succeed while creating a more diverse tech industry by providing access to real-world experiences and career and networking opportunities for all.

Verletta Kern and Beth Lytle collaborate to maintain the UW Libraries virtual space, Open Scholarship Commons. To expand this space into a more collaborative online platform, we conducted a needs assessment by interviewing other institutions with similar online platforms, as well as UW faculty. Through qualitative analysis, we determined recommendations and best practices for building an online digital scholarship commons that our sponsors can use to strategically develop an interdisciplinary online community at UW. This project supports the increase of interdisciplinary collaboration across UW.

The King County Library System genealogical collections have never been evaluated for their efficacy. This project surveyed the state of the genealogical collections through cataloging of collection material, interviewing the target audience and peers, and analyzing how it serves the community. While there was a range of practices from peer libraries, the target audience showed satisfaction with the current state of the KCLS collections and their accessibility, and current practices were evaluated to be effective with the available labor. With the gathered information, KCLS is better equipped to understand patron needs for this particular collection.

Building upon the work of a previous project, we have expanded and enhanced the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines for application to the Svoboda Diaries. The Project had an initial set of guidelines but were seeking a more robust model for representing the intricacies of the diaries. In this project, we developed a Svoboda specific schema, established a method of encoding the margin notes, and provided training materials to ensure the sustainability of this initiative. These resources bring the Svoboda Diaries Project one step closer to digitally representing the diaries in their collection and making them more accessible to researchers.