Capstone Projects | Information School | University of Washington

Everything, Everyqueer, All At Once (in Atlanta)

We hoped to research LGBTQIA+ archives in Atlanta, Georgia. While there are many queer archives listed in Atlanta, it is actually difficult to access them. Aside from a local public library known for its efforts to reach out to LGBTQIA+ Atlantans, it’s complicated to find material for queer Southerners outside of bookstores. By identifying LGBTQIA+ archives in Atlanta, other queer Southerners should be able to locate and use these archives. Also, others will be able to take the foundation of this project and seek out queer archives in other areas of the country.

Labor Archives of Washington Assessment Project

The Labor Archives Assessment Project is a project to assess the status of the Labor Archives of Washington (LAW)'s collections in terms of their level of description, preservation or conservation concerns, housing quality, and more. This information was added to UW Special Collections' ArchivesSpace platform via its assessment module, which allows information about the status of collections to be linked to their accession records within ArchivesSpace. This module is currently underutilized in UW Special Collections, and this project seeks to serve as an example of the beneficial use of the ArchivesSpace assessment module.

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.

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.

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.

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.

reflect: a full-length smart mirror for pregnant and postpartum individuals

Experiences of dissatisfaction are a pervasive issue in today's society, however, there are few information solutions available that specifically address this within pregnant or postpartum individuals. Recognizing that negative body perception can cause significant distress to both the parent and their child, Team U has developed a solution that fundamentally prioritizes mental health and well-being: reflect. reflect is a full-body smart mirror that integrates daily check-ins, intention setting, breathing exercises, reflection time, and mirror exposure therapy. Our goal is to encourage users to slow down, cultivate healthier relationships with themselves, and ultimately, help improve their quality of life.

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.

Scarecrow Metadata Project

Scarecrow Video is a nonprofit video store and archive that houses over 145,000 titles. Scarecrow has been growing its collection for over 30 years, across various catalog system conversions, resulting in many inconsistencies and gaps in the catalog’s metadata. For our capstone project, we were responsible for checking and correcting metadata within the Sci-Fi and Japanese Horror genres. Ultimately, we verified metadata for over 600 titles. This updated metadata will increase the usability and searchability of Scarecrow’s catalog, and assist the transition into Scarecrow’s new web-based system that will be launched in the next few months.

Sharing the Bounty: Rehoming Surplus Materials in the Whitman County Historical Society Archives

Working with the Whitman County Historical Society to help them discover what specific surplus materials they have in storage, I inventoried over five hundred individual items while creating a directory of potential new homes for those materials that fell out of the Society’s scope and flagging those that might be considered for integration into their collection. In conjunction with an interactive PowerPoint presentation, this project allows the Society to easily find and access these materials, with the end-goal of opening up storage space and moving on surplus materials to organizations that will recognize and utilize their full informational potential.

iSchool Capstone

2023