iSchool Capstone

2023

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Swedish Medical Center Historical Preservation and Education Initiative

Swedish Medical Center had a collection of materials documenting their history that they were unable to adequately preserve. I worked with Jay Augsburger, their Medical Historian, to fand an organization that could hold and preserve those materials and to prepare them for transfer, as well as to use their information to prepare historical documents for SMC's staff and the public. This ensures that a key part of Seattle's medical history will remain preserved and available to those who need it.
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Team AmaZine Workshop and Circulating Kits

We partnered with the Washington Center for the Book and the Washington State Library to promote zine culture, literacy, and community, and the annual Washington State Zine Competition. To address these needs, our team created, marketed, and hosted a zine workshop; assembled zine making kits; and used feedback from attendees, sponsors, and testers to improve our materials. We shared information and submission guidelines for the competition, and encouraged participation by our fellow MLIS students and community members. The zine kit materials we’ve prepared will be circulated to libraries around the state to host their own zine-making workshops.
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Texas Tech University Library Renovation

Our capstone project intends to transform how Texas Tech University uses student feedback to improve the campus environment and positively impact students’ lives. The project promotes student engagement and gives them authority to shape restoration projects by implementing a thorough feedback mechanism using a survey to collect and analyze student feedback on suggested modifications, assuring alignment with their requirements and goals. We have found that students would prefer new study rooms, upgrade connectivity via Wi-Fi, quiet areas, free printing, and improvised study pods in extra space. Our project enhances students' lives and builds a healthy campus community through this approach.
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The Acción Latina Pictorial Archive

Acción Latina, a largely volunteer-run community organization based in San Francisco’s Mission District, has been publishing a twice-monthly, bilingual newspaper since 1970 and producing an annual festival celebrating Latin American music since 1982. In 2017, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley acquired the Acción Latina pictorial archive. For my capstone, I processed and arranged the nearly 10,000 photographic prints and over 600 posters in the archive, and wrote a detailed, searchable finding aid that is now published on the Online Archive of California.
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The Application of Indigenous Knowledge to Decolonize Non-Native Cultural Museum Collections

To provide better representation of Korean culture and heritage, I completed a collections assessment of 336 items in the Burke Museum of Natual History & Culture’s Korean Collections. A majority of the donors are White and come from academic or war-related backgrounds, making these Western-curated and developed collections. Through reparative description, community engagement, and utilization of Indigenous knowledge, I have updated and enhanced previous item records adding context and community notes for future students and researchers. Furthermore, I have also conducted international repatriation efforts to return culturally sensitive items back to Korea through this project.
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The Black Panther Party Newspaper Digital Archive

The Black Panther Party Newspaper Digital Archive is the first community-protected archive to provide online access to cataloged and digitized copies of the Black Panther Party Newspaper alongside oral histories to scholars and individuals whose work uphold Black and revolutionary history. Using the Indigenous knowledge platform Mukurtu, access to the archive is scoped by community affiliation. In one year, we built the Mukurtu archive, created a classification scheme to catalog items, uploaded three volumes of high-quality newspaper scans, and conducted three oral history interviews with former Seattle Black Panther Party members and readers of the newspaper.
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The Brain Never Stops: The Power of Reading at Green Hill Academic School

Our project consisted of running a social media campaign for the Green Hill Academic School Library, located inside Washington State’s only fully-fenced, medium/maximum security juvenile detention facility. Our goal was to educate the public about the overall benefits of reading, the importance of meaningful library services for incarcerated youth, and direct potential donors to the library's Amazon Wishlist, which plays a critical role in the library’s ability to provide relevant collections to its young patrons. Since the start of our campaign, Green Hill Academic School library has gained 158 followers on social media, and 314 books have been purchased.
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The Future of Abbey Arts: Developing a Next Generation Website for a Performing Arts Nonprofit

As the performing arts industry evolves, so too must the virtual presence of organizations in the space. The goal of our Capstone is to develop a next generation website for Abbey Arts, a local nonprofit with limited resources to invest in modernizing its digital marketing. After conducting user testing, we built our solution utilizing Webflow with custom integrations for a seamless migration from the current tech stack. This new website will enable Abbey Arts to attract more attendees and performers, bolster its venue rental reputation, improve its search engine optimization, and better connect the Seattle community to accessible performing arts.
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The Gender Gap in Gaming

The gaming space and culture have been known to be discriminatory and toxic towards women online and in the workplace. Our team has worked to develop an interactive website that informs users about the gender gap in the gaming industry while providing them with a platform to share their experiences with gender discrimination. We have included data visualizations from pre-established datasets, created a form automatically updating visualizations for our users to submit, and provided an extensive list of video, text, audio, and event resources for our users to explore.
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The P21 Problem: Proposing a More Ethical Best Practice for Sex and Gender in Wikidata

P21 is a metadata property field used in Wikidata to record the sex or gender of living and non-living humans, animals, and fictional characters. This field conflates sex, gender identity, and gender modality, and may violate the consent and privacy of living people. There is no consensus or established guidelines for its use. My report proposes a set of more ethical best practices for using P21, as well as an implementation plan and set of use cases for this plan for using P21 for living people. This report aids in harm mitigation caused by Wikidata editors who misgender living people.