The roots of Lost Sounds Montana can be traced to a Havre, MT, basement with the discovery of a box containing long-forgotten seven-inch records. These rediscovered musical treasures are cause for great excitement among music lovers, but it is not only aficionados who benefit from the unearthed gems. The recordings, posters, interviews, and ephemera of the Lost Sounds archive offer a glimpse of a bygone era and the cultural and regional happenings that informed it. My project creates a taxonomy and metadata schema that will benefit the people of Montana, cultural historians, and music fans alike. By facilitating the inclusion of the collection in multiple digital environments, as well as a dedicated Lost Sounds Montana website, the potential audience grows exponentially. This interoperable schema prepares the collection for future growth and will aid targeted finding, while encouraging and fostering serendipitous discovery.

As project manager for the Newspace Library Cataloging Project, I planned, organized and cataloged the Newspace Center for Photography’s growing library with the OPALS cataloging system.  The Library includes more than seven hundred physical objects from photography monographs, to anthologies, criticisms, histories, serials, and DVDs.  This process included using the MARC cataloging standard, creating a how-to manual, and a weekly blog post to highlight materials in the Library. The Catalog can now be searched either at the Center or online and the materials have all had subject listings added to make finding those materials much easier.  The blog is also continuing to draw online attention to Newspace Center for Photography and its Library.

The Seattle Public Library’s Special Collections has done a fantastic job of preserving Seattle’s local history, but one of Seattle’s mainstays, its music, has yet to be addressed. This project broke new ground for Seattle Public Library by establishing a foundation for preserving audio recordings as part of the library’s special collections and providing the framework for building a collection in years to come. In addition to writing a collection scope statement, Dylan Joy and Dave Zelonka examined the issues of preservation, copyright, and access in regards to collecting archival audio material and tested a pilot collection. Now equipped with the necessary tools, the Seattle Public Library is closer to providing access to the art and history of Seattle’s jazz music than ever before.

The Museum of Flight Library’s technical files cover everything from aviation history to aircraft technical specifications. The collection’s depth and breadth makes it a potential source of tremendous value. Even noted historians have found materials within their areas of expertise that they did not know existed. However, neglect and disorganization have resulted in underuse. Finding things can be so difficult that researchers tend to avoid using the technical file collection. We analyzed the state of the collection and interviewed its primary users to determine their needs. We made recommendations for reorganizing and maintaining the files, and began implementing the changes. Most importantly, we left the library a procedures manual and other documentation to complete the project and keep the collection usable in the future.

StorySite is an interactive Google map designed for the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections: Gary Greaves Oral History Digitization Project. StorySite connects digital oral histories with their geographical locations and displays them in an accessible and user-friendly manner. Using historical interviews collected by Gary Greaves (d. 2009), an aspiring journalist and author, the project involved interview deselection (choosing from over 153 available recordings), audio editing (cutting,amplifying, and reducing background noise), metadata development (for arranging and displaying the stories by subject), icon selection, website consultation, and Google map implementation (via JavaScript). The recordings selected for this interactive map were cut into 1-3 minute story clips to echo the most important lessons reflected in the complete collection. These interviews, collected in the 1990s, describe multiple perspectives of the development Seattle went through during the 1950s-90s. This information provides an untold perspective of the history of Seattle that deserves our attention.