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.

East Asian libraries in the United States were born from the rise of Asian studies. Today, given the challenges of the outbreak of COVID-19, hate crimes against the Asian community, and the suspension of international trips, East Asian libraries must figure out new ways to provide their services and access to collections. This project is sponsored by UW's Tateuchi East Asia Library, aimed at understanding the information needs of the community and increasing its influence and visibility to continue providing effective information support for scholars and students in the new reality.

UCSC’s Special Collections needed to discover the prevalence and nature of outdated and problematic language within hundreds of finding aids that archivists have created. After conducting research and composing a literature review, I performed an extensive audit of the finding aids that included in-depth reviews of individual aids as well as keyword searching through the entire collection of finding aids. The changes that will result from this project will decrease the marginalization of subjects contained within the records while simultaneously allowing users of the finding aids to engage with a more inclusive discourse for resource description and access.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many Chinese citizens are eager to return to their home country. However, the Chinese authority imposed numerous travel restrictions, which made traveling back to China very challenging. TravelSaver provides regularly updated travel and quarantine policies and tools to manage travel plans, guiding users through the complicated procedures from preparation, scheduling for Covid PCR testing to the quarantine process. We expect TravelSaver to make the returning plans less stressful for Chinese citizens. More people would benefit from it and constantly contribute to validating and updating travel plans to polish the information and planning tools.

Epic Games provides the Unreal Engine to diverse users who use its functionalities for varied purposes. However, users often struggle to locate documentation most relevant to their needs. A keyword taxonomy would allow Epic’s technical writers to more consistently tag over 3,000 documentation pages, which would in turn improve searchability. By working to develop this taxonomy, we helped Epic to better understand the nuances of their unique knowledge management challenge. Our work yielded a proof of concept as well as recommendations that will help guide the company as they continue to work toward more equitable access to the Unreal Engine.

SPARC’s Author Addendum is a legal instrument that allows authors to modify a publisher’s copyright transfer agreement and keep key rights to their work, including the possibility of making it open access and widely available. For this project, I revised and edited SPARC’s accompanying explanatory literature about the Author Addendum and helped create four new deliverables for the information suitable for today’s information environment. At the conclusion of this project, authors who want to maintain their right to share their work widely and openly will have an updated resource for understanding the basics of copyright and open access.

Over 70% of the UW Women’s rowing team struggles with overtraining every year. We built an application that helps these athletes better understand their training data, and with those insights, make better decisions to reduce overtraining. Apart from analyzing large amounts of training data, we worked closely with student-athletes and team doctors to understand the symptoms of overtraining and define rowing metrics to create a training dashboard. Our Rowing Visualizer aims to help rowers and coaches better understand the effects each training has on team performance to avoid the negative outcomes from overtraining.