In light of reports globally of the impact of COVID-19 stay-at-home mandates on abusive relationships, our team has taken on the information space of domestic abuse and violence for our culminating Capstone project. Those experiencing violence and abuse in close quarters no longer have easy access to traditional resources and support services. To help alleviate this information access gap, our team has created and developed a iOS mobile app called Solace, which, equipped with robust cloaking mechanisms, acts as a comprehensive toolkit, enabling survivors to securely access reputable resources and communicate with advocates and members of their support networks.

Working with the collection development librarians at the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library in Seattle, I doubled the number of titles in their nonfiction collection relating to bullying, discrimination and abuse. My challenge was to build an inclusive collection written by and for the LGBTQ community, people of color, religious minorities and other disadvantaged groups. The 39 books purchased for this project will be produced in audiobook and braille versions and added to the InterLibrary Loan collection of The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled at the Library of Congress.

Tacoma Community House (TCH) offers a variety of services to the community, including adult English and education classes. Many clients expressed a need for materials to help them learn English and books in their native languages. Our solution was to create a self-sufficient library on site that will grow over time with a focus on bilingual books and multicultural materials. In addition, we created a dashboard with online resources in English and world languages that is available to all TCH clients. Both the physical library and dashboard will allow clients to access resources that will help them meet individual goals.

Teen social media use and teen mental health struggles have been on the rise for many years. This correlation has created a great deal of concern but there has been little study into the content of teen social media information behavior. The Twitter accounts of 77 teens were analyzed for mental health related content finding that these teens were suffering significant stress in their daily lives, struggling with social relationships, turning to celebrities for advice and information, and that teens with an active focus for their social media information behavior were less likely to share mental health related posts.

The LIS Mental Health Collective is an informal group of librarians and information professionals who seek to create a space to connect with others over topics of mental health. As the collective and its activities grow, so does the need for a centralized location for information. A website offers a convenient and accessible solution to this problem, bringing together resources about the collective and the topic of mental health overall. Through the website built through this capstone project, information professionals have an accessible entry point for joining the conversation about an important area of well-being.

Smartsheet is an enterprise platform that helps automate processes across a broad array of use cases, which strives to improve its offerings based on consumer feedback. The task of understanding and leveraging unstructured comments and emails from customers is challenging, which is why we propose a combination of topic modeling and sentiment analysis techniques to gather actionable insights, aggregated and presented as a dashboard to stakeholders thus enabling them to take data-driven decisions to improve user experience. The solution focuses on identifying negative feedback from users, in order to highlight potential areas of improvement, thus informing the future product roadmap.

In our capstone we wanted to engage patrons as participants in the learning process of an exhibit, rather than just as viewers. The New Soviet Child is an interactive user-collaborative exhibit that is meant to elicit patron responses as a learning mechanism. We believe that by having patrons engage with the material and offer their own interpretations, an exhibit can become a powerful tool for practicing critical thinking skills. The Pamela K. Harer Russian Children’s Book Collection was chosen for its vivid imagery that conveys the cultural and political changes of the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union.

The correspondence of Cardinal Richelieu was last compiled in the 19th century. That collection is acknowledged as incomplete and biased; underrepresented are letters from aristocratic women whose influence over events might not be fully understood. To remedy this, I have visited archives in Europe and the US to identify and photograph letters to and from Richelieu that were not included in the Avenel compilation. I have begun to transcribe, TEI-encode, and publish these letters in a digital archive, and will upload the teiHeader metadata to correspSearch, making this valuable historical information more accessible and compatible with modern research methods.

This project is rethinking the approach for e-commerce packaging. With the growing market of e-commerce, there is a dire need to generate a sustainable approach. By utilizing Amazon’s delivery process and packaging as a use case, our team proposes a new way to help decrease the number package needed to be produced while reducing the number of incorrect recycled materials being sent to the recycling center. Through the surveys, interviews, and research, our team has redesigned the current Amazon mailers for reuse to fit the new business process geared towards sustainability.

The Seattle Chamber Music Society’s (SCMS) new move has made way for the new Toby Saks Sheet Music Library, a 1,272-piece collection of solo and chamber music that was once Toby Saks’, a renowned cellist and founder of the SCMS. To organize and preserve the music and annotations, I constructed a five-tier classification system, wrote collection management recommendations, created a preservation and conservation resource guide, improved the searchability of the catalog, and labeled the scores, housed in archival folders. The collection is now browsable, usable and accessible to SCMS staff, visiting musicians, and community supporters for years to come.