The Malcom Stilson Special Collections, located in the Library Underground area of the Evergreen State College campus, houses the history of the institution, and consists of manuscripts and media in different formats. The purpose of this capstone was to assist with media digitization. I have also provided documentation on a new digitizing process, and metadata retention. It is believed that this will be of value to future students and staff, and help maintain consistency across multimedia collections. Additional deliverables include an analysis of DACS and EAD, and the pros and cons of incorporating EAD into a collection.

The Naturalist’s Scrapbook is a digital crowdsourcing project that activates the relevance of archival materials while growing community investment in the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History collections. Featuring digitized excerpts of the scrapbook made by the Museum’s founding collector, naturalist and lighthouse keeper Laura Hecox, the project asks volunteers to transcribe details and identify keywords for each scrapbook clipping. This information is operationalized by museum staff to engage nontraditional volunteers, enhance mission-relevant outreach content, increase awareness of the Museum’s history, and develop new directions for further research into the local history of Santa Cruz natural history.

The Soviet Broadcast Collection contains over a thousand hours of news, documentaries, and cultural programming aired in the Soviet Union from 1986 to 1992. The collection is currently stored on video cassette in the Suzzallo Library and is at risk of complete deterioration. Working with John Vallier in the Media Archiving and Digitization Lab, I was able to continue the work of digitally preserving this material. I have provided recommendations for the full preservation and sharing of the content, including creation of finding aids, adding media to the Media Arcade’s Jukebox, and making material available for language and culture studies.

As part of its Boundless campaign, the University of Washington is positioning itself as a way through which donors can support the causes they care about--like curing cancer, sustainable fishing practices, or increasing access to higher education. I constructed a thesaurus of philanthropic interests for UW Advancement so they can connect the causes donors care about to the departments that need their support. Upon implementation, my thesaurus will be used to index marketing content and tag prospect database records based on interests. My thesaurus is a first step towards helping donors connect with the right philanthropic opportunities easily and efficiently.

Carbonado is a small, rural town nestled at the base of Mount Rainier and is one of just three cities in Pierce County, Washington without public library access. The goal of this project was to determine community members’ interest in joining the local public library system and to clearly outline the process, costs and benefits of library annexation. The Mayor and Town Council can now utilize the research and analysis provided to make an informed decision about putting a proposition on the ballot, giving residents their first opportunity to vote on this important topic.

OCLC claims that the Dewey Decimal System is “continuously revised to keep pace with knowledge (1)," but what pace is that, and which knowledge? Following through with inaccurate ideas about the public, using language that supports pervasive socio-cultural hierarchies, has violent cultural implications that our public library stacks express linguistically and structurally. This project sought to apply alternative cataloging methods to a small collection of Black Feminist works in attempt to eliminate these biased practices and rectify issues the that arise, such as misinformation and access. 1. (goo.gl/VmwtNe)

As a bridging tool, this Access undergraduate award database is designed to compile academic raw data retrieved from central student information system to be in align with current university standards on student awards/scholarships, to effectively sort, filter, and select potential candidates for 25 pre-academic session awards provided by the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering and APSC. With only a few clicks, the access interface would enable users to shortlist students in orders based on various award criteria. Also, this database is linked with a departmental SharePoint site to get all the data synced and communicated among the award committee.

Digitization has enabled inward-facing memory institutions to provide unprecedented access to archived records, contributing to interdisciplinary discoveries and knowledge dissemination. In addition to an extensive specimen archive, the U.W. Herbarium supports a consortial database for digitized records and virtual tools for images. This expansion of institutional responsibilities with static or ad-hoc funding provides the impetus for a digital curation plan which is capable of functioning within the parameters of a modern herbarium. This project examined the modern herbarium’s information landscape yielding 3,000+ processed images, documented workflows, a targeted data curation plan, and two related articles for submission.

Documents produced during the video game development process are generally scarce because of a lack of incentive for companies to share their work and intellectual property; however, academic and other institutions have begun collecting and persevering video games and development documents in order to preserve the history of this medium. I conducted a user needs assessment of five distinct user groups about what they considered a development document, their individual user needs, and their thoughts on video game preservation in general to develop an initial metadata schema that would support individuals using these types of documents.

The Washington Library Association (WLA) has a rich past, but the archival material documenting its history were confined to over a dozen boxes, stacked away, collecting dust. Although there was interest in the WLA in examining its history, they couldn’t spare the resources to thoroughly examine the material. Our capstone team, aided by WLA historians, went through the boxes, organizing the material, discarding surplus documents, and selecting items of particular interest. We also created fact sheets covering a decade of WLA history, as well as creating finding aids to help anyone wanting to use the material in the future.