Aurora Picture Show is a media arts center in Houston, TX. Since its founding in 1998, they’ve presented a variety of noncommercial film and performance art, as well as various educational initiatives. Their documentation have been a mess for years, making it difficult for staff to find information about past presentations. After determining what would best meet Aurora’s needs while staying within budget, we created an updated database. Not only does this database make it easier for staff to do their jobs, the use of subject keywords provides a broad overview of the many topics that appear in Aurora’s presentations.

Literary Labyrinth addresses the need among beginning graduate students and advanced undergraduates in English for an introduction to conducting research in language and literature. The website gathers many of the most invaluable resources available to researchers in these disciplines and presents example research questions illustrating when and how to use such materials. While traditional library guides simply collect, organize, and display resources used in a discipline, Literary Labyrinth offers tutorials emphasizing strategy and process. The guide demonstrates how scholars can thoughtfully approach research by first deconstructing their query and then surveying the bibliographic landscape to chart a path toward answers.

The Long Shadows of Seattle podcast, also called the Seattle Civil Rights Podcast Project, was an endeavor to take some lesser known figures in the history of Seattle that have collections at the University of Washington and give them a platform. There are a great many historical figures that lived in Seattle that simply do not get the attention that they should, with many of the figures I covered having very little if anything written about them at all. Through this podcast I hope to allow a wider audience to explore some of the undiscovered Black historical figures of Seattle.

Items representing lowbrow art are underutilized within the Special Collections library at University of Washington. By creating an exhibit showcasing the unique and varied items that represent this art style, we strive to promote these valuable and timely materials to be better recognized by patrons of Special Collections as well as to highlight underrepresented artistic communities. Along with the traditional viewing of held materials, patron participation is encouraged through a Spotify playlist, DIY workshops, animation slideshow, and online catalogue. Additionally, a specialized Lowbrow Collection Development Policy allows for the possibility to acquire contemporary materials for collections in the future.

Since 2005, Nantucket Biodiversity Initiative has sponsored over 70 different research projects, but the reports and datasets from these projects are not easily available. We have designed a workflow to curate, label, and upload files to a searchable digital repository, and have built a documentation website to house the workflow and process documents. This supports NBI in becoming an open science leader among small science nonprofits, streamlines NBI grant reporting, ensures that researcher reports and data can be cited, and opens the possibility of research funded by NBI contributing to larger scientific studies and new knowledge creation.

Though public libraries have shared internal data, such as circulation data, publicly via open data portals, bookmobile data sharing has been limited. Sponsored by the Washington State Library, and using data from North Central Regional Library as a pilot, the Open Data Wagon project researched, collected, and published library bookmobile data openly on data.wa.gov, along with a reusable dataset template. Because bookmobile operations can be expensive, this project aimed to encourage information sharing among libraries, expand funding opportunities for mobile services by supplying additional data, and heighten the value of library mobile services. More info: https://opendatawagon.github.io

The personnel at West Pierce Fire and Rescue rely on SharePoint for their centralized information storage and sharing platform. This project sought to analyzing the current website content, identify users’ satisfaction with the current site, and incorporate user feedback to help improve user experience and searching capabilities on the site. A written report to the department included a summary of the research findings, a topical overview of updated files, user-friendly wireframes, and a moving forward document highlighting additional recommendations to help improve the overall design and information sharing opportunities on the SharePoint site.

How might we plan user-friendly entrances for the library? For this project, we learned about and applied service design tools at UC Berkeley’s new Center for Connected Learning to provide library leadership with input on a redesigned entry experience. After learning about service design, we created six fictional personas and walked them through different entry scenarios to examine each step. Then we created easy-to-understand graphics to provide the UC Berkeley leadership team with planning materials. Any library can use service design tools to improve the experience of its users.

Providing digital access to government documents requires a collaborative effort from both Federal Depository Libraries and digital repositories. This project prepares for the digitization of government publications held within the University of Washington Libraries while promoting access to documents already held within certified digital repositories. First, I created an index of World War II and post-war items held by the UW Libraries that have not yet been digitized and subsequently compiled a workflow process to aid in future digitization projects. Additionally, I developed research guides to facilitate access to previously-digitized collections on repository sites such as HathiTrust and govinfo.

This project involved cataloging a 10,000-document collection of newly digitized, multilingual Law Library of Congress treaties and international agreements. The collection was classified by metadata elements in a master spreadsheet. To ensure users’ ability to fulfill collocating and finding bibliographic objectives, LCSH and indexer-derived keywords were appended to each record. Inconsistencies between records were resolved using OpenRefine and blog posts containing trend graphs and search tips were constructed to promote the collection. When published online, this content will encourage information literacy by helping the organization’s increasingly networked stakeholders navigate and interact with this content for the first time.