The Northwest Annual was a yearly exhibition of painting and sculpture by Pacific Northwest artists, hosted by the Seattle Art Museum from 1914 to 1977, and served as a significant cultural event for regional artists. In order to properly manage and promote archival materials about the NWA, a new digital exhibition was created for SAM. This involved digitizing the original checklists, creating descriptive metadata, using OCR to improve search, restoring photographic material, and interviewing local NW art experts. This digital exhibition will now enable online access to these materials, providing rich information for researchers interested in 20th century Northwest art.

This project contributes to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM)’s Historical Media Collection, preserving materials stored in outdated formats. Due to limited resources, the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) lacks a digital preservation plan. A donation of 1,000+ slides, taken to document John Grimes’ cultural tour around Japan from 1987-88 and offering a rare glimpse at the ceremonies, architecture, and exhibits he observed, has remained unprocessed and inaccessible. To preserve and provide access to them, this project involved arranging and describing all 1,000+ slides, digitizing 200+ slides from over 20 geographical locations, and creating an Omeka exhibit for SAM’s Digital Collections.

The problem our project is trying to solve is that our Sponsor organization, a PreK-8 school, is unable to provide adequate library time to the students in grades PreK-3 due to a lack of resources. We created a diverse classroom library that rotates between the PreK-3 classrooms. Our goal is to support their literacy growth by increasing their access to high quality and appealing books. The books focus on diversity and inclusion acting as windows, mirrors, and doors. We also provided the school with resources that will assist them in continuing the work of adding diverse books into their library.

The Seattle Squeeze makes its transportation system strained. Although people are recommended to utilize Park and Ride facilities, they get frustrated when they do not know parking availability until they arrive. Our team EveREST addresses this information problem through providing real-time parking availability information. We gathered data from 686 users and designed a user-centered data pipeline. We collected real-time data through sensors, processed streaming data through cloud database, and visualized dynamic data through web application. Our solution not only helps users have equitable access to parking information, but also helps transit agencies make more effective decisions to solve Seattle traffic challenges.

Save the planet in Minecraft! We use Minecraft, a game familiar to hundreds of millions, as a learning environment where students work together to explore and learn about their environmental impact. Teachers can use our collaborative experience to instruct their students digitally, augmenting their instruction with our simple, modular lesson plans, and interactive Minecraft Education experience. Students can explore our virtual village, Tree Town, and work together to save the village from climate change, all the while learning about environmental issues and developing critical thinking skills. Saving Tree Town will help kids develop the skills necessary to save the planet.

ElectionGuard is an open-source solution not intended to be administrated by Microsoft but instead empowers organizations and voters. The ElectionGuard toolkit can be used in new and old voting systems alike and enables voters to check on their own if all votes that were cast are valid and accurately tallied. Being open-source, it does not compromise security or secrecy and does not rely on one particular software. How this solution works is a voter casts a ballot and is presented with a tracking code. At home, they can use said code to verify online that their vote was counted.

The existing voting process has not kept up with technological changes and the emerging threats. The election procedure is highly decentralized since each state has its own devices and methods for registering votes. Currently, there is no simple, user-friendly, and efficient method for verifying elections that can be widely adopted with relative ease. Our election verifier enables independent public verification of the cast vote. ElectionGuard verifier is an open-source, lightweight, and platform-independent system that can be used by any voter to check if their votes were cast correctly, without giving away which candidate the voter voted for.

The John Wott Slide Collection was originally intended to support academic reference and research, and it is now combined with 35mm slides created by Joy Spurr. Through this project, we intend to set up an organized foundation for the Elisabeth C. Miller Library to digitize these materials on a manageable budget and make them available to support teaching and research in a more modern era of technology. Deliverables include a weeded, organized, and cataloged slide collection, an online exhibit established in Omeka, and a research paper discussing digitization, preservation, funding, and budget options for the collection materials.

We worked with Reach Out and Read Colorado, a nonprofit that incorporates reading into pediatric care, to help improve literacy-rich waiting rooms in an urban and a rural clinic. First, we interviewed rockstar clinics about what makes a successful space. We then established community partnerships to provide books, art, and furniture. And we connected clinics with local librarians to promote library resources. Finally, we compiled our learnings into a best practices guide to be distributed nationally to ROR partner clinics. Although Covid-19 prevented us from delivering all materials, we managed to support the clinics and their efforts for early literacy.

Many companies communicate with their users in much more casual and conversational language than the formal English taught in schools. This casual writing style may help companies seem more approachable, but they may also seem to lack professionality and trustworthiness. In this study we are interested in how language formality affects people’s reactions in security-related interfaces. Through an online quantitative study we will explore these effects as well as how people perceive the formality of some major companies. Our findings could be used by companies to decide what tone they want to address users with to accomplish their security goals.