Bayou Playhouse, a small theater located in Lockport, Louisiana, holds a collection of costumes and props. However, there was no system in place to keep track of the current collection or any newly obtained items. This is an issue when putting together productions, as the organization often either wastes time looking for an item that may not be there or wastes money repurchasing an item that was already in the collection. To solve this problem, I designed a Microsoft Access database to create an inventory system. In the coming months, I will finish cataloging every item to complete the database.

Our project is helping the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICFL) modernize their existing free training resource: Alternative Basic Library Education (ABLE). While a successful program, it needs significant revision, consolidation, and updating to continue being a relevant LIS resource. We are supplying ICFL with the following documents to aid them: comprehensive content audit, user personas, and taxonomy terms/concepts to guide future content creation. The goal is to help ICFL continue providing free quality, versatile LIS resources while increasing the reach of the program to the underserved and the underrepresented in the field of library and information sciences.

Adequate and equitable library spaces and services are not available to every student attending Seattle Public Schools. Stakeholders with different priorities have resulted in SPS libraries that are chronically understaffed and underfunded. Seattle’s citizens signaled strong library support through the recent allocation of $219 million to Seattle Public Library (SPL), the city’s primary library system. This Capstone advocates for a comprehensive public-public partnership between SPL and SPS libraries to scaffold the tremendous work of Seattle's school librarians while bringing all of the assets of SPL’s world-class library system into every one of the city’s public school communities.

Bird the Gap is an outreach-oriented web mapping project to direct birdwatchers to locations currently underrepresented in crowdsourced data compiled by eBird and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. My multi-layered interactive web map uses two sets of raster data from eBird’s statistical models to identify geographic gaps in worldwide data from 2018. Using open-source software programs RStudio and QGIS, I prepared data for all 52 weeks. The scalable prototype uses Mapbox and its JavaScript library to visualize data from one week in July. Bird the Gap will assist in eBird’s ongoing mapping projects, which support scientific research and conservation efforts.

Books for Littles (BFL) is an online resource helping parents and educators engage kids with hard topics and social justice using children’s books. My wonderful sponsor, Ashia Ray, launched BFL in 2014. Today, the organization is flourishing, but has become burdensome for one person to manage. I worked with Ashia on a system to enhance collaborative efforts and reduce their individual workload, developing an efficient process for volunteer recruitment and support, a centralized resource describing specific tasks, and detailed documentation for complex tasks. I also researched grant funding to potentially cover future operational costs. Raising Luminaries logo used by permission.

For this capstone project I partnered with the Breman Museum, a Jewish heritage museum in Atlanta, GA, that is working to broaden their visibility by creating exhibits for the Atlanta roll out of the Google Arts and Culture project. I created two archival exhibits, focused on Jewish human rights advocates, described and uploaded a hundred artifacts to the online collection, and wrote an exhibit creation guide for staff and volunteers. This project brings to light Southern Jewish voices, humanizes the Jewish experience, and stimulates awareness of the collections held by the Breman Museum.

Documents reflect the historical contexts of their creation, and in doing so, become information objects. The serial novel is a type of information object, but due to re-editioning, reversioning, and digitization, most readers have lost touch with its historical significance. This analysis of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849–1850) uses the lens of information theory, in relation to literary criticism, historiography, and the history of the book, to grasp the serial novel as an information object, arguing that doing so requires intimate familiarity with the physical nature of the book in parts and the historical context of its production.

Dr. Ann Huppert and Dr. Pamela O. Long are developing a history of the Church of the Gesù, the first Jesuit church built in Rome. I implemented data organization, performed data entry, and created a Table of Contents for the 16th-century account book. The TOC tracks peoples involved, monetary transactions, materials, and other details relevant to construction that occurred between 1568 and 1581, and establishes a relationship between folio photographs and corresponding pages of the transcription. My work complements the researchers’ architectural and historical expertise, giving them a clearer picture of the construction project and facilitating the capture of data.

For many years, local libraries have been unable to field requests for access to both of Coeur d’Alene’s high schools' yearbooks. The solution has always been to refer patrons to the high school administration. These requests put an added burden on school secretaries and, because of school hours and school holidays, there is limited access throughout the year. Library workers and school administrators will now be able to easily forward requests to cdarchives.org for access to LCHS’s yearbooks. Plans have been created for both the upload of CDHS’s yearbooks and a full marketing campaign.

“Collections as data” (CaD) goes beyond traditional archival practices to analyze cultural heritage collections that support computationally-driven research. We analyzed George Mason University’s (GMU) Special Collections Resource Center’s (SCRC) procedures and metadata, drafted a report for the SCRC, and presented our findings. The team liaised between the SCRC and GMU’s Digital Scholarship Center (DiSC), a stakeholder in CaD initiatives and digital scholarship. This project modified SCRC’s workflows, procedures, and standards, improving accessibility to data-driven digital scholarship. The emerging strategic partnership between the SCRC and DiSC will provide researchers with new opportunities to interact with special collections materials.