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.

Population projections are estimates of the future population. As part of planning, states and localities across the country develop population projections on a regular basis, but methods and resources differ by area, making quality difficult to evaluate. This State and Local Population Projections Database, stored as part of the Applied Demography Toolbox, brings together state and local population projection information and materials from different sources through survey responses and file sharing. The database can be used by population projection developers and researchers for the study and analysis of population projection methods and associated uncertainty.

Doctors and parents in clinical trials face significant difficulties in tracking babies’ cries. The current method, handwritten crying logs, is inaccurate and offers little insight for clinical personnel. This project aims to use machine learning algorithms to more accurately identify and track cries. Hours of crying data were gathered and transformed into t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding, Support Vector Machine, and k-Nearest Neighbor algorithms, visually grouping audio clips by sound similarity. An audio debugger determines the accuracy of the groupings. With continued training and testing, the algorithms will be able to engage binary classification of cries.

Our team set out to understand barriers to COVID-19 data publishing across the United States. Working with our sponsor, Sarah Schacht, we investigated how governments process and normalize a high volume of data as well as publish information to a variety of stakeholders. We conducted an ecosystem scan of all 50 states and key informant interviews to understand public health department needs. Using our findings, we produced reports highlighting shortcomings and obstacles in COVID-19 data reporting and provided recommendations. The report will hopefully be used to remedy existing problems and prepare government bodies to manage data in the future.

Data-Driven Waste Management Solutions with trashcan pick-up frequencies are determined primarily by empirical observation. Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) sought a data-driven solution to better estimate waste levels and thus optimize waste bin placement and service scheduling. Our team detailed shortcomings of organization data collection and infrastructure, collaborated with stakeholders to create an appropriate data collection system, and created an optimization model to minimize costs associated with each collection route. Our efforts intend to reduce SPU’s expenses, support a cleaner city, and bolster SPU’s future information management practices to allow further opportunity. 

According to AP-NORC, 53% of Americans know nothing or very little about how money works in politics. After the Citizens United ruling allowed more money in politics, understanding campaign finance became more important than ever. Funds to Votes helps by displaying this data in a user-friendly and beginner researcher-friendly manner, allowing voters to make more informed decisions. Finally, in addition to helping ordinary citizens research their own representatives, our product is designed to aid endorsement groups in their research. This helps them decide who to endorse, which enables voters to select candidates according to their values.

In the State of Washington, catches of popular fish species are reported by recreational fisherman through paper cards. With this system, only an estimated 15 percent of fish catches are reported. Hook and Tell solves this problem by giving users a digital solution to report their catches and connect with other fisherfolk. Our platform will increase the catch reporting on recreational fishing, resulting in an increase in data and resources for Washington State to better protect its fish and wildlife.

Luther College expanded its majors and introduced two new interdisciplinary programs: Identity Studies and Global Health. The collections used to support these courses needed to be reviewed and appropriately developed to meet the needs of future users. Both have an emphasis on diversity and equity, and the collection also needed to reflect these values. Our project served to develop the collection in four key ways: analyzing the existing collection and presenting a report to the Luther library team, creating a list of recommended titles to purchase, creating research guides, and creating collection development guidelines and recommendations for subject liaisons.

Students and parents had to make challenging decisions regarding education during the COVID-19 pandemic. School districts across the US implemented varied school operation plans and the federal government did not create a centralized source for operational statuses at the national level. Data at the state level differs greatly in availability, verbiage, and format. This project aggregates and tracks district-level school operational statuses state-by-state, as well as school-related COVID-19 cases. It accounts for 6,800 out of 10,000 US school districts across 33 states. With this data, K-12 parents and children have a tool to make informed decisions regarding education and health.

The Sno-King Amateur Hockey Association collects and stores tens of thousands of registration and donation data entries across seven different platforms each year. With their data storage not being centralized, accessing their data has become increasingly difficult as the organization has grown and more data continues to flow in. For our Capstone project, we were tasked with creating and filling a centralized database, and then making analyses based on that data. From the work we have done, our sponsor will be able to make their own analyses to make better marketing decisions for its adult and youth hockey programs.