Accessing comprehensive course information before registration is critical for UW students to select courses that best satisfy student needs and interests. However, our research indicates that over 60% of students express that course information is limited on current solutions, such as MyPlan and Rate My Professors, and most end up asking friends for course recommendations. By leveraging official data from Course Evaluation Catalog, we aim to empower students’ understanding of courses’ content, difficulty, workload, and peer evaluations. With UW Course Expert, students can optimize their course selection and enhance their academic potential.

The Fortnite Creative Documentation site provides users with information to build their own custom islands and interactive game experiences. However, the existing site was spun up so quickly that the site design needed to be improved to meet primary audience needs. For this project, we generated both the short-term and long-term suggestions for the Epic Games to optimize their website through providing high-fidelity prototypes and a UX content analysis. Users will benefit from best practices in search and navigation in our design, and Epic will have a more accessible website with matched branding and higher user engagement.

Volunteers are an integral part to most non-profit organizations, but often these organizations don’t have the resources to build a sustainable volunteer program. The Volunteer Sustainability Toolkit provides a guide to help onboard and train volunteers while maintaining the volunteer program, regardless of organizational turnover.

In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Washington State Library collected data on service disruptions across the state’s public libraries. We have built on this effort by curating, enriching, and tidying the information in this dataset — adding variables to transform it into a time series, filling in missing values, and archiving the digital sources we referenced for each observation. Our curated dataset and supporting materials, published on the Washington State open data portal, will serve as a comprehensive record to shed light on this historical moment and inform future research and emergency response planning.

This project supported the Washington State Library with weeding the Anytime Library, an online library with over 66,000 titles. The library supports a consortium of public and tribal libraries in Washington State. A literature review was conducted to determine best practice for weeding online libraries. The findings discovered that weeding an online library is not the same as weeding a physical library. As a result, new guidelines were developed and used in the project. The team also developed an evaluation tool and process guide. Only part of the collection was evaluated due to the large size of the collection.

This project sought to identify queer books in a public library's young adult collection and evaluate the various representations, including BIPOC and disabled representation, as well as determine if the tagging system is effective. Utilizing the library's online catalog, Amanda identified nearly 100 materials published from January 2020 through March 2022 within the library's YA collection, with the majority having some kind of BIPOC representation.

Library of Congress Subject Headings perpetuate the biases of the sources used to establish them. For Indigenous and other peoples, standard research practices using written reference sources may result in subject terms that do not reflect what people call themselves or wish to be called. Changing our approach to gathering and prioritizing information can result in more ethical and accurate representation of people and peoples in library catalogs.

We acknowledge that librarianship is subjective, but subjectivity invites potential for artistry, esotericism, provocation which I feel is sorely underexplored. My project encompasses four works of library art - art which critically and creatively engages with the theory, practice, politics, culture, technology, and mechanics of libraries and information. My work includes exploratory information technology and design experiments and ideological messaging, but above all it is art, aimed at intangible enrichment of the self and others.

The Washington Talking Book and Braille Library (WTBBL) needs diverse collections in order to meet its users’ needs. In order to expose gaps in WTBBL’s holdings, our team conducted a diversity audit of the young adult collection. We found that the authors and main characters in the collection are overwhelmingly white, cisgender, and heterosexual. We recommended ways to make the collection more representative of Washington’s population and improve the library’s subject headings. With these recommendations and the data to justify them, WTBBL will be better equipped to serve its users with diverse, representative collections.