iSchool Capstone

2017

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Professional Recommendations: Career Services and the LIS Student

Since its formation in 2013, the iSchool Career Services department has proven to work effectively for Informatics & MSIM students, but a persistent challenge remains with students in the MLIS program. Utilizing surveys of current students, alumni, and faculty and a comparison of best-practices across ALA-accredited institutions, this project conducted a review of Career Services in order to identify information gaps between the department and the LIS student body, craft recommendations to address issues discovered, and facilitate an improved experience for both this student population and Career Services staff.
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Reading Between and Beyond the Lines: Analyzing African Children’s Literature

The Ann P Wyckoff Teacher Resource Center (TRC) offers a library of resources geared towards helping educators engage their students with art and culture. With the upcoming remodel of their space, the TRC thought this would be a great opportunity to reorganize as well as reevaluate their current collections for diversity as well as authenticity. Through researching guidelines created by publishing companies and found in online resources and journal articles, we created our own general guideline for evaluating multicultural children’s literature and applied the worksheet to the Fiction African Children’s Literature collection.
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Refresh the Desk: Improving Reference Services

Seattle Pacific University (SPU) requested a review of its declining reference services for the first time in eighteen years. To make recommendations for SPU’s references services, information was collected from three sources. First I reviewed several items: the library itself, current students at SPU, the needs of millennial students, and a literature review of reference service trends over the past ten years. Second, eleven local academic libraries were surveyed to learn how similar institutions are offering reference services. Third, reference service and database use at SPU’s library were reviewed. Based on this information, changes to reference services were proposed.
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Rhema Life Ministry Website Project

Rhema Life Ministry has an interesting information problem, in that they add a complex network of interpersonal interactions to the normal information challenges most organizations face. In my Capstone project, I built on their best practices by applying iSchool lessons about Information Grounds, Knowledge Management, Digital Curation, and of course Website Development. Software used included Photoshop, Lightroom, GitHub, VS Code and Nero. Communication skills and active listening were very important in allowing me to reach my goals, and exceed my sponsor’s expectations as we worked to develop a website that would support current success and future growth.
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Seniors & Librarians: Tech Skills, Security and Information Privacy

According to many studies, older patrons that struggle with technology will often turn to their library for support. Our sponsor noticed this trend at Kitsap Regional Library’s Sylvan Way Branch. However, two issues were apparent: first, there were inherent privacy concerns in helping patrons with their online needs and second, many patrons needed extensive help beyond the time that could reasonably be devoted to helping one patron. Through observation and research, our team created a series of handouts on a variety of targeted topics. Our work bridges the gap between protecting information privacy, education, and staff time constraints.
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Serving International Students at UW Libraries

I teamed up with the UW Libraries Teaching and Learning Group International Student/ELL Subcommittee to continue an investigation done by a capstone group in 2016. While the previous year’s project focused on reaching out to international students about their concerns, I reached out to the librarians and library staff at UW to see how conscious they are of the needs of the international student population and how they address those challenges. Through the course of the project I also gathered more information about what programs our international students are coming from in order to better inform staff and future training.
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Sistema Integrada de Información y Evaluación Tseltal (SIET)

One Equal Heart Foundation is working with the Tseltal indigenous community in Chiapas, Mexico, to develop the first known Tseltal language library and archive, with the goal of preserving Tseltal language and culture. This Tseltal House of Wisdom is part of a larger community development initiative called Sistema Integrada de Información y Evaluación Tseltal (SIET), which includes a community radio station and fotohistorias-style evaluation project. We conducted capacity-building workshops in Chiapas emphasizing inventory, cataloging metadata, and digitization. We also provided recommendations on archival storage materials, and wrote a paper describing the intersection of Indigenous Systems of Knowledge and LIS theory.
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Social Media & Dialogue Facilitation: An Autoethnographic Journey

For organizations and groups, combining social media and dialogue together can be even more of an important tool for communication, promotion, awareness, and action. While opportunities are there for dialogue via social media platforms, it can be hard to implement due to a lack of training or experience in dialogic methods, or a lack of awareness that these dialogic tools are available. This research project investigated the impact of using dialogue facilitation techniques on social media in an effort to have more meaningful dialogue and increased engagement via electronic platforms.
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Sound, to Print, to Cloud: Saving the news with the Milo Ryan Phonoarchive Finding Aid

The UW has over 1500 hours of historically important audio in the Milo Ryan Phonoarchive. This collection includes archived CBS radio broadcasts, primarily from the World War 2 era. Currently, it is difficult for scholars to identify materials of interest within this collection. Metadata for this collection including titles, broadcast dates, and program titles were transcribed into a printed book. In this project, the book is being converted to a fully searchable digital finding aid using enhanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques to greatly enhance the original scans.
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spl.org Redesign: Non-User Research

Public libraries exist to provide equitable access to information, which requires continuously working with communities to understand their needs. My Capstone is part of SPL’s efforts to involve community members in their website redesign process. This project asks, “Who, taking into account language and digital access barriers, does not use spl.org, and why?”. To answer this question I analyzed data from SPL surveys and worked with branch libraries and community centers to design and run qualitative research sessions. My deliverables include data towards my research question and recommendations for conducting future SPL design research projects.
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