Texas Tech University's User-Center Services Department wants to begin collaborating with students regarding their collection development efforts. Librarians are working to find gaps in the collection and make purchases, but they want to explore more ways to work together with students and better understand their needs. The goal of this project is to create a basic, easy-to-use guide that will help library staff begin the engagement process with students. The plan includes an outreach roadmap, examples of how to engage with different student groups, examples of surveys, and a social media campaign.

The Teen Meme Privacy Project set out to address particular ways in which privacy and surveillance impact youth, complicated by intersections of their sociopolitical identities. We committed to acknowledge the reality of systems of power in their lives – such as white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. By honestly and unequivocally engaging these within the context of their lived experiences, we worked with our Teen Advisory Board to create relevant, authentic, and impactful shareable material, and fill the need for a robust set of privacy resources made just for teens, on topics they care about, in language and formats they use.

As the world becomes a more diverse place, workplace staff is still predominantly white. To assist with globalization, we created a toolkit that will help employers hire more diverse staff. Our toolkit outlines five steps in order to create a more inclusive and diverse workplace. These five steps are: reflect, create goals and objectives, create and modify policies, train and implement, and finally evaluate and repeat. The website we created is free and accessible to anyone in hopes of having employers use it to seek out information and tools to diversify their workforce.

Misinformation is a pressing global issue; it is increasingly easy to post false or misleading information on the internet and reach massive audiences. Alongside the Center for an Informed Public, Puzzle Break, and The Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA), we created an online escape room to mimic the psychological and emotional responses elicited by real-life interactions with digital misinformation. The escape room aims to equip players with the necessary skills to identify misinformation online and become savvy, skeptical digital citizens.

The Cabrinety Project is a large-scale digital preservation effort between Stanford University Libraries and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to create forensic disk images and photographic scans of materials in the software series of the Stephen Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing. My task was to assist with digital preservation by sending out permission agreements for the digital software items in the collection. I identified rights holders for the 8,000+ items in the collection, sent permission agreements, and then based off their response, determined the level of access each digital item will have in the collection.

This project’s primary aim was to build the electronic infrastructure to catalog what is available in the Lambert House Library so that we can expand services offered to young adults. Over the course of the year, we established a new catalog system, input the collection into the new software, cleared out damaged or out-of-date material, and configured an easy-to-use circulation system. With the completion of this project, patrons of Lambert House can finally locate material and check books out, while staff can assess what books are popular among the collection and where there is room for expansion.

The Millworks is a Food Campus and Affordable Housing development on the Bellingham waterfront. Community Engagement is needed to gain community support and investment to make the project more viable. Part of the challenge is how to solve this problem during the COVID-19 pandemic when a social gathering is not recommended. Our research led to an online platform where we can engage with the community. We hope to allow the user to make a difference in getting their community voices heard through submitting ideas, taking surveys, and joining online events. This can create a lasting impact on the community.

Children's librarians moved storytime online at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic without knowledge of what works in that format. The project sponsor, Claire Scott, began weekly community storytimes and struggled with replicating the interactivity and community building present in-person. Through observation, research, surveys, and trial, I tested various new elements with Claire's storytime audience. I found that platform matters; freeze dances, scavenger hunts, and getting off mute helps with interactivity; and I created a Facebook group for the adults to connect with one another. I also created a one-page guide for other librarians to use in their storytimes.

Otherworld Media intends to launch an online platform for school age children to engage multiple literacy skills while deepening comprehension and developing imagination. The final project will be a guide for parents and educators to encourage the self education of young learners. A growing body of research points to the need for young children to use safe search strategies. The goal is to give children, especially BIPOC, access to counter storytelling narratives, and regain control over their own education. Children will then grow into better educated and more well rounded adults with strong skills in self determination and self advocacy.

The Rainbow Connection is a capstone project aimed at improving the Follet Destiny Discover catalog interface for the LGBTQIA+ community of Ballard High School. Together with the sponsor, TuesD Chambers, MLIS candidates Henry Christopher, Jess Gray, and Leanne Pacheco work to improve the navigation of the library’s web pages, increasing ease of searching and information gathering. We survey the students and staff of BHS to gain stakeholder input. Then we create several digital collections to organize books by subject beyond what the current software provides. The result is an easy-to-navigate digital collection allowing users to find and access LGBTQIA+ materials.