Utilization of library resources is instrumental towards academic success; however, library anxiety can inhibit student’s ability to access library’s resources. The present study investigates how book clubs influence library anxiety. Five librarians were interviewed about their experiences with book clubs. Patterns emerged indicating book clubs offering holistic student support, focusing on building relationships, and addressing different levels of anxiety saw decreases in library anxiety. Suggestions for best practices in designing and running book clubs to decrease library anxiety are provided. Reduction in library anxiety helps increase a student’s ability to use library resources and can thereby increase their academic success.

This capstone presentation provides a high-level summary of Corey Cherrington's work building a digital archive for the Celtic Arts Foundation in Mount Vernon, WA. To complete this goal, I have created an archive for the Celtic Arts Foundation’s historical materials (physical and born-digital) and enacted a long-term plan to stabilize the records involved in this archiving project. Key areas of focus are: Digital Preservation, Digital Asset Management, Information Architecture, and user experience design.

To fix the broken relationship between the Base Library and middle school students, Liz Gershon used the lessons learned in her courses and a 3D printer to build community. She began with laying the foundation by learning the students' names, showing them movies, and modeling positive interactions for other staff. To build on that goodwill, Liz created a collaborative class for the students to learn TinkerCad and print those creations on the 3D printer.

Plenty of people move into the Seattle area from out of state for a variety of reasons and the first thing they'll notice is the Seattle Freeze, a held belief that Seattle is a very difficult place to make new friends. Well, the best way to meet people is by going out and doing things you love or maybe trying something new. Bump, is here to do just that! Through the app, you can get personalized recommendations for places to go in the area, and soon you'll be able to recommend others places just like any local.

The technical overhead of implementing an e-commerce platform is often difficult to manage for startups without time or capital. This is particularly true for business and entrepreneurship students at UW, who are working to develop their business plan and execute it during the academic year. Bussin’ Goods aims to solve this problem by offering a turnkey e-commerce solution tailored to the needs of student startups that are selling physical goods. Our tool allows these students to focus on making their products as innovative and socially impactful as possible, helping them generate revenue faster.

From the 1960s to 1990s, Plattsburgh had a vibrant culture of concerts and performances, playing host to rock groups and to speakers that were touring the Northeastern US and Quebec. Many influential artists visited the local SUNY Plattsburgh campus. For my Capstone project I focused on a period of time (1980s and 1990s) and interviewed five former students and local Plattsburgh residents. We talked about their experiences at these events and more broadly about their lives living in this town. I am creating an online exhibit showcasing these interviews and the events that the alumni reminisced about.

Research shows that over half of American households engage in gardening activities, with a rise of over 18 million new gardeners since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, what has also been on the rise is global greenhouse gas emissions. Our solution is Carbonet – a platform for new gardening enthusiasts to reduce their carbon footprints through home gardening. Through our virtual, personalized trackers and community features, home gardeners can not only reach new milestones in gardening more efficiently, but can also make a measurable difference in combating global climate change.

This project entailed item-level cataloging of rare 78rpm shellac discs from the Offenbacher Mozart Collection at the UW Music Library, with a focus on materials recorded before 1923, which entered the public domain in 2022. After complete and accurate bibliographic records had been created, additional research and data remediation allowed a previously unidentified set of audio files to be associated with metadata and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Cataloging physical and digital elements from this unique research collection has created an unprecedented level of access to rare sound recordings from the early 20th century.

The Center for an Informed Public (CIP) has an enormous volume of data that has been collected for over a decade. This data spans hundreds of targeted and ongoing crisis events and has been sampled and archived in various ways. This capstone's objective is to make the CIP's research sharable, reproducible, and accessible. The result of this capstone is a web-based library with test datasets and documentation on how the CIP can start the process of creating their data library. The data library will help establish the CIP as a leading organization for social media-based research on misinformation and disinformation.

Our team seeks to understand the relationship between climate change and the 15 different community types that our sponsor, the American Communities Project, has identified. Working with climate data provided by USAFacts, we seek to analyze and understand temperature/precipitation data, as well as income data, to see if we can identify significant relationships between specific communities and climate change. Our website contains data visualizations that will assist journalists in telling the story behind these communities and drawing conclusions about their impact on the climate.