The Seattle Art Museum’s Historic Media Collection (HMC) is a collection of over 3,000 digitized audiovisual materials related to the museum’s educational programs and exhibitions. Our project’s goal was to develop an initial set of subject headings for these materials. We focused this initial set on Indigenous Art because Indigenous peoples’ identities are historically underrepresented or inaccurately described in controlled vocabularies. To accompany the list, we developed a framework and guide for the museum to use in creating inclusive and representative subject descriptors for other art areas and as part of the museum’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This project is to work towards a digital archive of the manuscripts, photos and other items. There is about 700 items within the collection, the main concept is to catalog them, and recommend the best practices for the archive. This opinion will establish a framework for the organization that can be perfected in the future and give an idea of the collection at hand. One of my goals for this project is to start the conversation about access to digital archives and the differences between the funding each library has access to.

Our project, Data Forensics, is part of our sponsor’s larger Data Afterlives project. The NSF asks researchers to make federally funded data available. We researched NSF awards to see if we could find data associated with these projects. Our findings demonstrate the challenges in finding data and how the accessibility of data varies depending on the NSF research area. We discuss the steps that we took in the course of our research, as well as why this research matters, particularly to information professionals and how national policy shapes the future of open research. We offer future avenues of research.

In 2018, the Camp Pendleton Libraries (CPL) assessed the needs of homeschooling families through an anonymous survey. The survey results revealed that CPL homeschoolers needed more than just books to enhance their learning. The creation of Discovery Kits serve these needs and encourage patrons to learn new hobbies, skills, and topics without encountering the financial barriers or commitment involved when learning something new. This project resulted in the creation of 60 Discovery Kits offering a range of themed materials across different ages. They work to enrich the learning endeavors of parents, teachers, homeschoolers, and independent learners in the CPL community.

Divergent Academia is a resource guide for librarians and instructors to better support neurodivergent student learning in higher education. Neurodivergence can include autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and learning differences such as dyslexia, as well as some processing and mood disorders. The Divergent Academia guide takes the form of an open access literature review of articles and resources, ranging from time management tools for students to best practices in instructional design. Using this guide, academic librarians and educators can alleviate stress and dismantle barriers of access for students who would otherwise have to expend energy to advocate for themselves.

The information problem we addressed was University of Washington’s electronic theses and dissertations not being easily accessible and discoverable online. Our results included an updated workflow and code, three improved master schemas, thousands of new master’s and doctoral theses, students, and committee members now discoverable via Wikidata, and handoff documentation and a training video for library staff and future Capstone students. Having thesis records converted to an open-source linked data format improves their reliability and discoverability. Our work helps future UW CAMS and PCC professionals, and also makes the scholarship of UW graduates more accessible outside of traditional catalogs.

HEALWA is an online medical library for healthcare professionals hosted by the UW Health Sciences Library via a contract with the Washington State Department of Health. HEALWA sponsored this capstone project with the goal to increase visibility and accessibility of its resources to better serve the information needs of its users. The project encompassed the curation of eBooks for 12 of its existing professional toolkits, creation of 3 new interdisciplinary toolkits, and drafting of 4 blog articles on the online library's news page. The enhanced and newly created toolkits have the potential to facilitate research for Washington State's healthcare professionals.

IHME has identified the need to evaluate if their keyword taxonomy functionality could be enhanced to improve search experience for public users of their data catalog. The results of this evaluation are a deeper understanding of the keyword taxonomy’s current functionality, how it compares to similar data catalogs, and where valuable changes would enhance current functionality. The results will improve user experience for not only public users, but internal users as well. These changes will also support more efficient internal processes and place IHME in a solid position to grow the functionality of their keyword taxonomy over time.