This is a collaborative project between the Mount Vernon City Library and the Mount Vernon High School Mariachi Program to provide Folklórico (Mexican Folk) dance instruction and create a community literacy campaign. The central focus of this project is to engage with teens and Latinos who are currently underserved by the library and connect them to the library through outreach and innovative programming. This project promotes library resources to teens and within the school community and reinforces the school district's mission to be facilitators of lifelong learning by connecting students to the public library.

Dating games are interactive electronic games that touch upon complex, real-world issues such as successfully navigating relationships, achieving healthy emotional intimacy, and exploring gender and sexual identities. However, conventional game tagging does not reflect the nuances of the genre or serve player information needs. To address this, we developed a taxonomy that is more inclusive of queer themes and can be adapted for both user-facing and back-end game cataloging purposes. We refined it with feedback from user interviews and industry professionals and applied it to create an online repository of dating games that serves as an information hub for players.

First-grade teachers at Glenridge Elementary School in Kent, Washington, were not given resources or curriculum to teach their social studies units. This led to stressful workloads for teachers and differing instruction for students. We surveyed teachers to determine their current practices and needs and researched the learning standards. We then found engaging, equitable, and standards-based open-access resources to create curriculum units encompassed into learning kits. These kits will help teachers plan their units and provide similar resources and talking points to make instruction equitable for students. Students will also see themselves in their learning.

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.

Some tribal leaders and communities may not have access to the information they need. There are many factors at work, including unreliable internet access, paywalls and academic jargon, limited resources, etc. At the same time, the pressure is on tribal communities to respond to pressing issues like climate change, water security, global pandemics, data sovereignty, and more. By developing and sharing these modules, with tribal citizens as our core audience, we hope to place information in the hands of communities so they can share and disseminate this knowledge as they wish.

My project was sponsored by the Bellingham Public Library and built on directed fieldwork that I conducted in the summer of 2020 to support BPL’s project "Peoples’ Perspectives", a community initiative hoping to capture life in Whatcom County during COVID-19. The resulting archive, consisting of submissions from the community, will be preserved and displayed online through Omeka S. I provided recommendations for BPL on best practices, vocabulary, metadata, and digital preservation going forward.

The Zines on Zoom events served to promote the Washington Center for the Book’s project, Sheltered in Place: COVID-19 Zine Diaries Project. We organized a focus group and a workshop to teach adults about zine culture and zine-making with the goal of inspiring them to create a zine to submit to the Sheltered in Place project. In these two virtual events, we celebrated zines and highlighted their ability to both exemplify and preserve human expression. We hoped to help participants process their feelings during the pandemic in a flexible and creative format.

Our project centered around creation of student training and documenting progress for the Peer Education Program (PEP), a new model of student employment at Odegaard Library based around peer mentorship. Our deliverables included a You Should Know About learning experience for Libraries' staff, training modules for the first PEP cohort, and a Toolkit to act as an introductory resource for those interested in the project. This project helped to promote the PEP initiative, train new student employees, and create a guide for project duplication.

Interest in Portuguese Studies is growing, as evidenced by a new Minor in Portuguese Language and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Washington. Previously, Portuguese was only taught to the 200-level course. Now, students are researching in Portuguese and can access a collection with 300 items published in Brazil, Portugal, Mozambique, and two LibGuides with digital collections and repositories from Lusophone countries. This project aimed to improve the Portuguese studies collections, teaching, and research support services to meet students' information needs.