Many colleges and academic programs undergo recurring accreditation. In this process, documents and information about the college or program must be collected from all of the units within the college, collocated, and shared with the accreditation committee in a timely manner. This presents several challenges. Many of the documents involved contain confidential material. In addition, collecting the documentation can be very time-consuming in a large college. Third, collocating documents in a place where many staff people have access can involve the risk of accidental deletions or faulty editing. My project involved building a SharePoint site to facilitate the AACSB accreditation process for the College of Business at University of Wyoming. SharePoint is an ideal tool for accreditation because it is secure, provides version control for recovery of lost or damaged items, and offers robust permissions control. For these reasons, this project has a broad application to other accredited institutions.

First Steps Preschool Infant Teachers are responsible for recording accurate and detailed information on paper charts while caring for infants in the Infant Room. One to two teachers care for five to eight infants from 7am until 6pm, Monday through Friday. Teachers dedicate over 60 minutes a day to recording and sharing with parents the activities and behaviors involving the daily health, habits, and significant developments of the infants. This all must be done while performing a variety of tasks such as feeding, changing, rocking, coddling, playing with, and/or holding one or more infants. A charting application on a mobile device in the Infant Room will allow the teachers more time to care for the infants rather than having to additionally juggle clipboards, paper, pens and other objects. Time needed for charting and verbal reports will be reduced while time available for caring for the infants will be increased.

My capstone focused on the preservation, arrangement, and description of photographs made by Dolores Varela Phillips, documenting the 1970 conflict between two tribes, Nisqually and Puyallup, and Washington state law enforcement. Results include EAD finding aid and digital access to the collection. These images shed light on a critical period of national and local civil-rights history. Phillips’ collection is comprised of negatives she hid in her purse lining to prevent confiscation by the police. The photographs capture an important event that was the catalyst to a revision in Washington state  laws. Negative collections are distinctive and a time-consuming variation from standard processing. This often hinders valuable materials from reaching the public; a mounting information problem archives face. Raising awareness about the significance of this rare collection is paramount as 2014 marked the 40th anniversary of the new law passing. Already, these images have received user-requests for a Smithsonian exhibit. 

The United States Forest Service has a long history of caring for the land and serving people. A significant part of that history are the foresters themselves: their memories, experiences, and stories. Every National Forest has a Heritage Program and for decades, volunteers and foresters have been collecting oral histories from retirees, volunteers, and their families. Some interviews were written down, others recorded in a variety of formats. The challenge: How to approach the preparation of these materials for storage and public access at the National Museum of Forest Service History. We worked with the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and the Museum to assess current resources and develop a sustainable process for digitization, storage, and public access. In addition to the immediate needs of the collection, we also wrote internship and volunteer handbooks and developed the business case to help sustain ongoing work at both the local and Museum levels.

The Paul and Mildred Brownell Photograph Collection is a large unprocessed collection composed of photos, film, and ephemera from the mid-twentieth century of the Brownells’ experiences as UW Alumni, Seattle Public School teachers, and their travels in America and abroad. These items span almost 5 decades and are a valuable experience of living in the Pacific Northwest as UW alumni. The collection has been organized into specific series with regards to intellectual order which facilitates curatorial use of the collection and some public access for general research, which is imperative to keeping UW history alive. Special attention has been paid to the context in which the items were created and in preserving these items. A preliminary Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aid has been created to enrich Special Collection’s growing EAD database and will allow others to share in Paul’s experiences.

Over the summer, The Seattle Public Library (SPL) made the switch from manual counters for reference activity to a digital clicker application. Rather than use a hand-held manual counter, librarians now track interactions at their information desks by clicking “Reference” or “Non-Reference” in an online form. However, with increasingly busy desks and more technology related questions coming forward, does this online clicker serve as a reliable measure of the information needs of SPL patrons? We conducted a total of 56 two-hour long observations across 13 SPL branches, paired with an employee questionnaire, to determine the reliability of this system. Our data found that patron needs are not necessarily reflected by the current application. In order to better serve and fund our public libraries, we propose a comprehensive tracking application that will more thoroughly track the investment needs of the SPL system.

Golder Associates (Golder) has over 5,000 consultants located worldwide, and works with clients in many sectors including oil and gas, mining, and waste management. One primary internal SharePoint tool Golder consultants use to share information and stay up-to-date is Collaboration Workspaces (CWS). Within each CWS, sub-sites are broken down by client sectors, technical communities, and regions; however, not much is known about how consultants use the sub-sites and if CWS meet their needs. Our team performed user behavior analysis on a user activity log in conjunction with user research for the purpose of improving users’ internal communication, efficiency, and satisfaction within five CWS sub-sites. We helped Golder better understand the user composition, user habits, important existing features, and potential improvements of these CWS sub-sites. More important, we created a methodology that is replicable, can be built upon, and will be applied to other CWS sites to further facilitate information sharing.

What do you do when numbers don’t tell the whole story? The University of Washington Libraries received data from faculty members about undergraduate research skills in its 2013 Triennial Survey. Confidence had dropped regarding student abilities to develop and refine research topics, find scholarly information, and critically evaluate sources. To find why these numbers were lower than desired, we interviewed 13 faculty members in ten different departments who teach UW undergraduates, asking them about their expectations for students, important research skills in their discipline, and factors that do and don’t lead to student success. Using the qualitative data collected, we formulated recommendations for the UW Libraries Teaching and Learning Group. These recommendations will help librarians work toward measurable improvement in student research skills, while taking into account the size of the university, programs that are already in place, and the comments and suggestions heard most often during our faculty interviews.