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.

Responsible for languages such as Klingon and Dothraki, constructed language creators invent the grammar, phonology, and lexicon of fictional languages - a practice known as “conlanging”. Despite the growing popularity of conlanging, conlangers lack sufficient tools to document their languages. In turn, conlangers devote significant time and effort towards recording information by-hand. In this capstone project our team collaborated with renowned conlangers David Peterson and Jessie Sams to create LangTime Engine, an application that simplifies the process of recording a conlang’s lexicon. As a result, we hope to ease the manual burden of conlangers and to make conlanging more accessible.

Market maps groups companies providing similar services together for industry analysis. Its optimization addresses limitations of manual creation and user customization. Through NLP techniques including keyword extraction and topic modeling, we have achieved improved segmentation, better naming, enhanced brand-image and credibility. The project's results include automation of a cumbersome manual task and faster refresh, resulting in reduced latency and improved customer experience. By enabling customers to find companies in newer segments as a starting point for research, our project makes a significant difference in the lives of investors, entrepreneurs and stakeholders, empowering them with accurate, timely insights for better decision-making.

E-commerce has been around for a while, however, shoppers are faced with decision paralysis with the abundance of options available online. Our backend technology, E-Telligence API, automatically searches the web to identify other websites where a specific product is available, enabling shoppers to compare prices and make an informed decision quickly. Our sponsor, NetPrism, plans to add this technology in their browser extension.

Small to medium-sized companies face a significant challenge, as they are disproportionately targeted for cybersecurity threats and data breaches. To address this issue, we have developed Nova, an easy-to-use, effective, and affordable chatbot. The impact of Nova is twofold: it empowers clients to navigate and implement the NIST framework, address their cybersecurity needs, and educate themselves through tailored guidance.

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.

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.

Last year, SGS, a private, nonprofit middle school, moved into its permanent home, along with a collection of 2,000 books and no library staff. The library presented many challenges, namely an uncataloged fiction collection, a nonexistent circulation system, and an overwhelming lack of student engagement. Together with my sponsor and four students, I developed the Student Librarianship Program, cataloged 775 fiction books, established a check out process, and celebrated our progress with the entire school. SGS’s community of 170 students and staff now have a library they can use and a renewed sense of excitement about its continued evolution.

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.