Seasonal Affective Disorder affects more than 15 million people in the U.S., with women four times more likely to be diagnosed than men. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic makes more people live with limited social interaction and reduced sun exposure, which are leading factors that could cause/exacerbate SAD. Better Weather is a web app which helps SAD sufferers combat their symptoms with proven interventions. Through its different feature pages, users have the chance to foster connectedness & peer support, relieve stress, increase exposure to sunlight, and ultimately improve their mood.

Current discussions about ethical use of artificial intelligence for cultural heritage focus on bias, privacy, and surveillance. This paper illustrates how ethics of heritage AI should expand beyond those themes into broader human and environmental exploitation AI causes that put it at odds with efforts toward decolonization. This paper suggests a holistic, interdisciplinary approach that examines the broader effects of AI used for heritage work and focuses on AI that is used for collections and exhibits. It focuses on AI use by heritage organizations such as libraries, museums, and archives, in addition to non-heritage groups participating in heritage work.

Diverse BookFinder critically reframes diversity in picture books through identifying trends in BIPOC representation and providing resources for creating intentional collections that decenter whiteness as the dominant narrative. This capstone initiates developing asynchronous teaching and learning resources that complement existing tools. Through a sorting activity that connects dominant messaging trends and race/culture narratives, librarians, educators, and caregivers will grow their awareness of the impact of BIPOC representation and develop skills to expand their own collections. This project highlights the necessity of active engagement and reflection around which books we read, whose stories we value, and how experiences inform narratives.

Green Hill School is a juvenile rehabilitation center serving young men. The library receives limited funding and struggles to maintain a current and relevant collection. Books serve as a valuable tool for emotional regulation, self-awareness, academic and personal growth, and pleasure. Access to books that meet their interests is crucial to the success of the residents. We utilized social media to crowdsource monetary donations and direct purchases from a curated wishlist. Eighty-seven percent of our wishlist was purchased, and we raised $2,160 in monetary donations. This will ensure a thorough library collection for current and future residents.

The Brigantine Yankee Catalog Project aims to catalog and embed metadata for photographs documenting the sixth sailing voyage of the Brigantine Yankee through the Pacific Islands. The photographs had been digitized but were not cataloged at the Burke Museum, making them inaccessible. By cataloging the photographs, our team was able to increase this collection’s accessibility not only for the museum staff but also, more importantly, for Pacific Islander communities. These communities feature prominently in the images but their identities and cultures were not always documented properly; providing access and inviting input from them will lead to more accurate and respectful representation.

Sno-isle Libraries, which serves Snohomish and Island counties in Washington state, has seen a dramatic increase in the number of patrons who are struggling with homelessness due to the Covid-19 pandemic. To address the needs of this vulnerable population, I have compiled a community asset map by identifying local nonprofits, government agencies, shelters, McKinney-Vento Liaisons, social workers, and public schools that work with individuals and families struggling with homelessness. This document will be distributed to all managers and librarians within the Sno-isle Libraries system and will be used for future outreach to create a stronger, better social safety net.

Japanese seed beads are identified by the color code assigned to each product. Three primary manufacturers assign their own alphanumeric codes, while a wholesaler combined all three identification systems into a new system. This creates confusion among consumers because these systems are not well understood and are not yet cross-referenced. My ontology is the foundation of a knowledge base that will aid in more accurate identification of colors between manufacturer numbers and the corresponding product in the wholesaler’s system. This resource will facilitate accurate color-matching and increase awareness of the variety of seed beads available.

The Geology Library Database was created for students, staff, and volunteers in the UW Burke Museum Geology and Paleontology Department to facilitate library resource discovery. The database was created in FilemakerPro and utilized linked data to allow for easy browsing. It also makes use of its own controlled vocabulary and fully documented schema. As part of its creation, over 250 records were entered to test its capabilities. Once it is fully populated, the database will increase ease of access to materials for the volunteers who do not have the same level of access to UW Libraries as their paid colleagues.

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.