iSchool Capstone

2023

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Lambert House Library Assessment and Improvement

The Lambert House LGBTQIA+ Youth Center houses a large special collection of queer and trans books but has lacked a clear classification system with a functional digital, remotely accessible catalog and check-out capabilities. I built off of previous work by adding or amending approximately 400 digital records to the public-facing collection, recommending subject heading changes to increase accessibility for intersectional identities, and weeding almost 300 materials for archival, donation, or disposal. I am continuing work with Lambert House to develop clear documentation of policies, ensuring a smooth transition to future volunteers and better serving LGBTQIA+ youths’ information needs.
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Laying the Foundation Between the Library and the Mam community

During a visit to our sponsor library we became aware of the resource needs of the Mam and how we as a group can help the library to meet those needs. Through our work we were able to create resource and suggestion lists as well as finding literature which surround the Mam community and immigrants as a whole. We also were able to conduct surveys and interviews to gauge perceptions of the library system. Our project is impactful to the Mam community as it hopefully creates a helpful guide for future collaboration between the library and the community.
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Make It in the MakerSpace: Projects and Programs for High School MakerSpaces

With students turning to school libraries as a space for time away from the more academic aspects of school, MakerSpaces are increasingly popular. Five high schools in the Seattle Public School District (SPS) currently have resources dedicated to MakerSpace activities. MakerSpaces provide students with a creative outlet and opportunities for de-stressing, social emotional learning, and collaboration. This project set out to design facilitated and unfacilitated projects and programming for students at Ballard High School through the library MakerSpace. Informed by student feedback, the result is a project bank of activities, kits and workshops that can be used in MakerSpaces anywhere.
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Making Connexions: Poisonous Books, Repatriation, and Rare Book Catalog Records

Rare books require special considerations when creating catalog records - ones that modern monographs do not. Working with Washington University’s Olin Library and their department of Special Collections, I learned about various fields that are of note in rare book cataloging, such as those regarding provenance and binding descriptions, as well as training on using OCLC Connexion and MARC. I demonstrated this training through projects such as identifying arsenical books (Winthrop’s Poison Book Project), identifying rare Jewish books and their provenance for repatriation, and cataloging a backlog of donations from the Hochschild family.
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Modeling Manuscripts: Visualizing Collation Using VCEditor

Understanding collation is an important part of studying material texts. However, current tools for representing this information, such as collation formulae, can provide obstacles to accessibility. The Collation Visualization project (VisColl) helps to remedy these issues by providing a means of visualizing a codex’s collation via a digital model. In this project, I created models for 39 codices held by Penn Libraries using VCEditor, the software implementation of VisColl. I then helped prepare the models for upload to ScholarlyCommons, University of Pennsylvania’s open-access institutional repository, and created documentation to assist future VisColl contributors.
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Montgomery Innovation Planning Capstone

The goal of this project was to help a preschool-8th grade independent school to evolve their Innovation Vision through research about stakeholders goals, review of existing resources, collaboration with other school learning lab spaces, and a foundation in the school’s own mission. By synthesizing input from each of the stakeholder groups with my MLIS experiences, I was able to write an Innovation Vision for the school, along with a specific list of observations and suggestions for development of their new Innovation Center. This Vision will serve as a guide for the evolution of the Innovation Curriculum in the coming years.
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Out of the Vault: Descriptive Bibliography and Unveiling Primary Sources

A small collection of 8 early printed books resided in the vaults for 70 years, unidentified and uncataloged. This collection was only known to two librarians in UW Libraries Special Collections, and remained unidentified due to lack of time available for catalogers to work with them, and lack of urgency for such materials from researchers. In order to help catalogers begin the cataloging process, I identified and created proto-records for these books, and designed two outreach events for rare books librarians to use in the future that would bring more awareness to the existence of the collection.
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Puyallup Public Library Historic Project

The project's goal is to digitize all the physical records, documents, artifacts, photos, that have originated from and around the Puyallup area. These digitized objects will then be uploaded onto the Puyallup Public Library website for local use.
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RDA/RDF Application Profile Design

The library cataloging communities are transitioning to the official Resource Description and Access (RDA) as their new standard for resource description. This project addresses the need for application profiles to facilitate the creation of well-formed RDA metadata. The focus is on designing a profile for describing print monographs and implementing new data models, entities, and elements introduced in the official RDA. The result is eight Sinopia resource templates and accompanying HTML guidance documents. This pioneering work will enable libraries to start creating RDA/RDF description sets and is expected to promote wider adoption of the official RDA.
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Robert Garfias Film Collection @ the UW Ethnomusicology Archives

This project took digitized films of Robert Garfias (founder of the UW Ethnomusicology Archives) and made them accessible via the UW Ethnomusicology Archives and Internet Archive. This largely included cleaning up and working with the metadata, and creating standard filenames, all the while considering copyright and ethics of the films. While uploading films there was a deeper work with metadata, particularly with subject headings and material descriptions, and continuously learning about the processes of preserving and/or digitizing film.