Epic Games provides the Unreal Engine to diverse users who use its functionalities for varied purposes. However, users often struggle to locate documentation most relevant to their needs. A keyword taxonomy would allow Epic’s technical writers to more consistently tag over 3,000 documentation pages, which would in turn improve searchability. By working to develop this taxonomy, we helped Epic to better understand the nuances of their unique knowledge management challenge. Our work yielded a proof of concept as well as recommendations that will help guide the company as they continue to work toward more equitable access to the Unreal Engine.

SPARC’s Author Addendum is a legal instrument that allows authors to modify a publisher’s copyright transfer agreement and keep key rights to their work, including the possibility of making it open access and widely available. For this project, I revised and edited SPARC’s accompanying explanatory literature about the Author Addendum and helped create four new deliverables for the information suitable for today’s information environment. At the conclusion of this project, authors who want to maintain their right to share their work widely and openly will have an updated resource for understanding the basics of copyright and open access.

Voices: Data from an Expansive Christian Community is a structured repository of people, published media, and affiliate organizations that expands beyond the hegemonic voices of white American Evangelicalism and represents a more diverse, ecumenical, and global vision of Christianity. It provides a metadata schema and selection criteria for a curated dataset intended to support further research and analysis. The structure aims to elevate diverse content creators across disciplines who engage in smart and significant conversation about Christianity and its intersections with other faiths, race, social justice, gender, sexuality, and environmentalism.

The Washington Department of Licensing (DOL) is a core agency of our state government, providing a variety of personal and professional licenses and other legal documents. It manages huge amounts of data about Washington’s people and economy, and its data analysis is crucial to our legislature. However, its data governance lags behind its goals. We conducted dozens of interviews with DOL employees on how and what data they work with to craft a taxonomy and recommendations for how DOL should organize/conceptualize its data, improving efficiency and making the agency more responsive and modern, resulting in better services for all Washingtonians!

Lower Lake Michigan – the area ringed by Illinois, Indiana, and parts of southern Michigan and Wisconsin – is full of shipwrecks and other sunken historical treasures. The knowledge of the wrecks’ histories, survey records for preservation purposes, what actions can be taken to recover artifacts and create new documentation, etc., is spread widely across the Lake Michigan dive community. The Wrecker’s Report is a new reference document that compiles federal, state, county, and city laws to assist divers in planning shipwreck diving expeditions.

Otherworld Media is a nonprofit media production organization that creates educational programs for children. It produced a radio show “A is for Adventure” with various literary themes and genres. Otherworld wanted library scavenger hunts to tie into the radio show to encourage children to use library resources. As the needs of today’s children changed due to the pandemic, the initial designs for scavenger hunts were adapted into an outline for an online game. A programmer is using the framework of games and resources we created to complete development of the game.

Academic libraries can mindfully collaborate with higher education in prison programs and support system impacted students on their campuses. Nonetheless, barriers may arise when forging these connections. Focusing on the UW tri-campus system, this capstone drew on design thinking methods to discover some of these obstacles and generate potential solutions. The result is a project on Manifold, a digital platform that the UW Libraries and Press are currently piloting. Overall, the capstone’s goal is to serve as a starting point for the UW Libraries to consider co-creating instruction, programming, and resources with stakeholders to support current and formerly incarcerated students.

When responding to emergencies, police and firefighting organizations often miss critical pieces of information which adversely affects their response. As part of a pilot program for entrepreneurial capstone projects, Adaptive Resilience, LLC involves equal parts business and product development in an attempt to create a product that meets information needs of emergency responders and a business model to support the product. Through user-centered design practices and rapid generation and iteration of business models, we have come up with a novel solution oriented around a data-aggregation pipeline and UI that could be rapidly realized and scaled beyond a single industry application.

At Highline College Library, systematic assessment of one-shot information literacy sessions has not been prioritized due to the busy nature of community college librarianship. Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) has been at the forefront of instruction at Highline, so we set out to bring the two together in a practical way that could be implemented by providing assessment tools and EDI checklists. We worked to find resources through an environmental scan that Highline librarians could use to ensure instruction is serving the needs of all of their students, regardless of background.

Circulation staff at the Beale Memorial Library have noticed an increase in the number of interactions they have had with homeless patrons. Circulation staff have not been trained on how to meet the unique needs of homeless patrons and this lack of training often leads to tension between circulation staff and those experiencing homelessness. A webinar training discussing how best to assist homeless patrons and their unique needs is in development. By using the information provided in this webinar, circulation staff will be able to identify and address the needs of homeless patrons.