It can be an intimidating process for students looking for the first internship or knowing where to take your career. There are gaps in knowledge from lack of experience, as well as feeling intimidated, or being unsure of what actions to take. laddr aims to bridge this gap for students who are seeking career-related opportunities by helping them create an actionable plan powered by advice and insights from peers, mentors, and historical data. Your career path is unique to you, but with laddr, we’ll climb to the top with you.

Lakewood High School students reported browsing for fiction books in the library, as well as searching for fiction books in the library’s online catalog, to be cumbersome. Library staff planned to genrefy the fiction collection to address this issue. However, their full workloads left them unable to start on the project. Our team, then, carried out this genrefication. We assigned genre classifications and added genre labels to the roughly 3,000 books in the fiction collection. We also updated those books’ catalog records to reflect proper subject headings and keywords. Now, users can more efficiently browse and search this collection.

LANA was created to improve the English learning experience of students of our sponsor, Transcend Academy. It was developed as an all-encompassing solution that combines video conferencing, instant messaging and whiteboarding into a single web tool. Until LANA the instructors at Transcend Academy used multiple services to facilitate teaching which was often irksome for the non-tech savvy users. LANA was developed to streamline and simplify this complex process.

Library Outreach to Unhoused Populations is an analysis of best practices for Bellingham Public Library. BPL wanted to find ways to better serve this growing part of their community. Research into programs in libraries, interviews with community members experiencing homelessness, and conversations with experts in the field, led to a report of practices that work well dealing with this complex issue. The recommendations that comprise the final report will enable the library to implement new initiatives based on compassion, empathy, and equity. Most importantly, these recommendations mean moving toward a climate of inclusivity for all members of the Bellingham community.

This project will explore the problems currently plaguing data collection, data management and data interaction associated with the community and public libraries in the continent of Africa. Following our analysis, through extensive user interviews of all stakeholders involved, we will propose detailed solutions for each touchpoint ( collection, management, and interaction), keeping in mind the environment (Limited access to the internet, Limited Bandwidth, limited resources) in which the stakeholders operate. Our solution will consist of a detailed plan to address all the issues we identify, a timeline to execute all proposed development and a final recommendation for the ideal platform.

This study investigates how academic libraries can advocate for students experiencing mental health obstacles while promoting academic success. Student mental health distress may stem from a diagnosis, academic stress, unmet basic needs, or life circumstances. We explore what barriers staff encounter in these scenarios, and how academic libraries can build upon existing resources and practices to offer increased support for students’ well-being. Based on our research and interviews with academic library staff, we have developed a set of best practices that can be used by academic libraries to better advocate for and support higher education students experiencing mental health hardships.

Migration Trail is a board game that presents the lived experiences of Central Americans traveling from San Pedro Sula, Honduras to the Mexican and the United States border seeking asylum. Migration Trail uses the power of storytelling and narrative building to create realistic yet fictional characters, and scenarios that allow participates to experiences the plight of this mass migration. These methods of storytelling and gameplay are applied to connect and draw outsiders in understanding the issues surrounding these mass migrations. The goal of Migration Trail is to highlight, reflect on, create dialogue, and make agents of social change for migration.

“Potentially Predatory Journals” (PPJs), or journals that may not adhere to proper academic peer-review, could give false credibility to questionable or pseudo-scientific papers. These potentially questionable papers can sometimes leak into the public via social networks, cherry-picking or emotionally charging results to further specific political/ideological causes. With the proliferation of “foreign information campaigns” (FICs), or state-backed disinformation operations, these social media posts are often amplified/distorted. The goal of this project is to investigate these two sources of science misinformation and lay the foundation for future work in this space.

My project focused on teen library services in Mohave County, Arizona. Teen usage has dropped off over the last few years and my task was finding ways to better engage with them. My research, done via countywide survey, indicated that teens want to engage more with digital technology, and that many are unaware that the libraries have teen centers. My report indicated that an emphasis on technology and more outreach would bolster library usage. My research helps the library to create a stronger informal learning environment tailored to their interests, and one empowered by keeping teen voices in mind.