With the rapid transformation to the digital age, one sector that has changed the least is the banking and financial sector. After the creating of the first cryptocurrency, there has been an eager push to use this technology to benefit humanity by creating new technologies that harness the power of a decentralized system. Every new technology is a double-edged sword. It can be used to benefit people as well as suppress them if used incorrectly. There have been efforts by organizations as well as countries to use cryptocurrency to collect personal data and evade sanctions.

Our marketplace search recommender system is a web app that users can use to explore the apps related to a persona or a given mobile app based on PushSpring's local user data rather than average result such as the ones Google gives. Our system was implemented with both CNN and NLP to maximize diversity and relevancy in recommendations. Combining benefits from both content-based and user-based recommendation models, our model produces valuable insights that can't be found elsewhere.

The KRAB FM Lesbian-Feminist Radio Program was originally broadcast through the 1970s and 1980s in Seattle and was one of the earliest American gay and lesbian radio shows in the United States. This capstone creates an opportunity to engage with and explore local historical archival material in a different and more accessible way while also highlighting materials in special collections. The project aids in exploration and discovery opportunities while utilizing a format that is easily accessible in the current technological age. This project allows the discoverability of, and for, the Seattle Queer Community.

This project seeks to investigate how interlibrary loan (ILL) serves the queer community. Results indicate that many libraries are marketing their ILL services to patrons. Privacy issues occurred rarely. A large portion of the queer community gets their queer material from the library. This community appears to both know about and use ILL services. Reasons queer participants gave for not using the service range from privacy issues to not knowing how to utilize the service. ILL departments can better serve the queer community through targeting them in its advertising, creating inclusive policies, focusing on privacy, and looking into eBook lending.

The Readiness Acceleration and Innovation Network (RAIN), a biotechnology incubator, wondered whether they effectively collect data about their educational programming. They were concerned with effectively measuring their impact, as well as issues around underrepresented groups in the sciences. This project included in-depth background research, a data collection audit, analysis of organizational artifacts, and stakeholder interviews to make recommendations for their data collection and curation practices. Best practices were presented to collect demographic data about underrepresented groups and to make RAIN events more welcoming.

Our sponsor, Raise Wages Now, needs a tool for its members to build profiles which engage and incentivize them to answer more questions. Our main work is creating a member information collection tool, or a profile builder. As our sponsor uses the Drupal, a content management platform, on their website, our solution is to design a new Drupal module that we can add onto theirs. The main technologies we used in our solution were PHP for the back-end and Vue.js for the front-end.

According to the landmark study done by the Center of Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente (1997), Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) that happen in childhood can have lasting negative impacts on a person’s mental and physical well-being. Read-a-Rama is an early-literacy non-profit that works with children who come from diverse backgrounds, and life experiences that include trauma and ACEs. Read-a-Rama: A Trauma-Informed Care Approach involved the creation of five tailored trauma-informed care training modules and a comprehensive resource LibGuide for staff. This project will help staff foster a safe, collaborative, and empowered early-literacy environment through the principles of a trauma-informed care.

Memories of Japanese American incarceration have been plagued with incorrect and euphemistic terms that downplay and erase the racism, cruelty, and trauma of incarceration. This language has also made its way into archival descriptions. This capstone aimed to better understand the terminology and language used by the Japanese American community and scholars and to develop archival guidelines for writing more accurate descriptions. A set of recommendations was developed with metadata and technical suggestions. These recommendations will help archivists (re)describe their Japanese American incarceration collections with more appropriate terminology and context.

Recommended Reads for Equity is a collection of equity-, diversity-, and inclusion-focused books curated by members of the University of Washington community. The collection grows based on book recommendations that create an evolving representation of our community’s collective and individual experiences. Our work in organization, outreach, and accessibility revitalized focus on the project and re-engaged the UW community. We re-designed the webpage, formalized protocols, promoted and expanded the collection, and created a repository of community booktalks. Ultimately, this collection builds connections between community members by bridging themes of equity, diversity, and inclusion in books through sharing meaningful personal experiences.

The Caltech Archives hold a heterogeneous audio collection consisting of over 1300 cassettes, digital audio tapes (DATs), and CDs with content from 1932-2004 that has been slowly degrading while trapped in the archive. This project’s aim was to answer how this collection could be preserved and made more accessible to the community. It involved checking the physical items, streamlining the metadata in OpenRefine and reimporting it into ArchiveSpace as a resource record. This will allow the archive staff to move forward with preserving the audio through digitization and transcriptions that can be linked to the resource record for further accessibility.