To address the information needs of the UW Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Leadership Team, we developed materials that analyze, assess, and provide training on Scalar, an open-source authoring and publishing platform. Through research and examination, we wrote a literature review that compared Scalar to similar publishing platforms, evaluated its accessibility, and examined its potential as an open digital scholarship platform. Additionally, we crafted learning resources and facilitated an interactive online workshop to assist librarians in identifying and promoting Scalar’s features and use cases for future students, faculty, and the broader research community.

The KRAB FM Lesbian-Feminist Radio Program was originally broadcast through the 1970s and 1980s in Seattle and was one of the earliest American gay and lesbian radio shows in the United States. This capstone creates an opportunity to engage with and explore local historical archival material in a different and more accessible way while also highlighting materials in special collections. The project aids in exploration and discovery opportunities while utilizing a format that is easily accessible in the current technological age. This project allows the discoverability of, and for, the Seattle Queer Community.

This project seeks to investigate how interlibrary loan (ILL) serves the queer community. Results indicate that many libraries are marketing their ILL services to patrons. Privacy issues occurred rarely. A large portion of the queer community gets their queer material from the library. This community appears to both know about and use ILL services. Reasons queer participants gave for not using the service range from privacy issues to not knowing how to utilize the service. ILL departments can better serve the queer community through targeting them in its advertising, creating inclusive policies, focusing on privacy, and looking into eBook lending.

The Readiness Acceleration and Innovation Network (RAIN), a biotechnology incubator, wondered whether they effectively collect data about their educational programming. They were concerned with effectively measuring their impact, as well as issues around underrepresented groups in the sciences. This project included in-depth background research, a data collection audit, analysis of organizational artifacts, and stakeholder interviews to make recommendations for their data collection and curation practices. Best practices were presented to collect demographic data about underrepresented groups and to make RAIN events more welcoming.

According to the landmark study done by the Center of Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente (1997), Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) that happen in childhood can have lasting negative impacts on a person’s mental and physical well-being. Read-a-Rama is an early-literacy non-profit that works with children who come from diverse backgrounds, and life experiences that include trauma and ACEs. Read-a-Rama: A Trauma-Informed Care Approach involved the creation of five tailored trauma-informed care training modules and a comprehensive resource LibGuide for staff. This project will help staff foster a safe, collaborative, and empowered early-literacy environment through the principles of a trauma-informed care.

Memories of Japanese American incarceration have been plagued with incorrect and euphemistic terms that downplay and erase the racism, cruelty, and trauma of incarceration. This language has also made its way into archival descriptions. This capstone aimed to better understand the terminology and language used by the Japanese American community and scholars and to develop archival guidelines for writing more accurate descriptions. A set of recommendations was developed with metadata and technical suggestions. These recommendations will help archivists (re)describe their Japanese American incarceration collections with more appropriate terminology and context.

Recommended Reads for Equity is a collection of equity-, diversity-, and inclusion-focused books curated by members of the University of Washington community. The collection grows based on book recommendations that create an evolving representation of our community’s collective and individual experiences. Our work in organization, outreach, and accessibility revitalized focus on the project and re-engaged the UW community. We re-designed the webpage, formalized protocols, promoted and expanded the collection, and created a repository of community booktalks. Ultimately, this collection builds connections between community members by bridging themes of equity, diversity, and inclusion in books through sharing meaningful personal experiences.

The Caltech Archives hold a heterogeneous audio collection consisting of over 1300 cassettes, digital audio tapes (DATs), and CDs with content from 1932-2004 that has been slowly degrading while trapped in the archive. This project’s aim was to answer how this collection could be preserved and made more accessible to the community. It involved checking the physical items, streamlining the metadata in OpenRefine and reimporting it into ArchiveSpace as a resource record. This will allow the archive staff to move forward with preserving the audio through digitization and transcriptions that can be linked to the resource record for further accessibility.

The goal for this project was to envision possibilities for reorganizing the fixtures and collection of the Roosevelt library to make it a more dynamic space. Though the project was significantly impacted by COVID-19, weeding between January and March reduced the collection by just over 1,000 volumes. Recommendations for improving the library’s overall flexibility and accessibility include completing the weeding work, purchasing new shelving units on casters, and reorganizing the book collection to make it more accessible. Potential impacts include increased library use, greater campus unity, and readiness for a future as a 1:1 school.

AO3 is a nonprofit run fanwork database with a staff of volunteers organized into committees. AO3 Support frequently receives questions about how to perform basic site functions already answered in FAQs. Video tutorials may make it easier for users to find answers to their questions. However, there are many aspects of the video medium which differ from text. I researched software and created and tested a process for creating screencasts so that AO3 Docs volunteers can create quality tutorials without having to reinvent the wheel.