We CAN is a proposed nonprofit organization providing nature and animal assisted activities for youth victims of violent crimes in the greater Tacoma area. Being the victim of a crime should not be a lifelong punishment. We feel that children who participate in our programs, along with traditional therapy, should have a greater chance for successfully recovering from trauma and abuse they have had to endure. Our programs use animal assisted activities and nature adventures to help children who have experienced trauma or abuse learn to develop healthy trusting relationships to live full and productive lives.

Public libraries are always looking for ways to ensure that they cater to each demographic group in their communities, in particular marginalized and underrepresented groups. My project helped Wilsonville Public Library in Oregon cater to a group that previously flew under its radar. I have developed and implemented a book club at a controversial, recently-constructed women’s prison within the Wilsonville community. As the ultimate goal of the Oregon Department of Corrections is to reduce the rate of recidivism, our uncensored book material will provide for constructive discussions aimed at promoting literacy and pro-social behavior in the inmates. This book club provides an effective liaison between the Department of Corrections and Wilsonville Public Library in a way that benefits all stakeholders. Even auxiliary benefits of such a connection are apparent, as community awareness has led to several donations of books to the prison library.

Have you ever held a musket ball or a three-foot long walrus tusk? Ever wondered what a sad iron is, and how it was used? Artifacts like these are just a few of the more than 600 items the Museum of History and Industry uses in support of its programming for children and families. With curriculum covering everything from the Coast Salish Tribes of Puget Sound to Century 21, the Seattle World's Fair, MOHAI's programming brings local history to schools throughout Puget Sound. With the museum's move to their new location this collection is now at a storage facility in Georgetown, across town from South Lake Union where Education staff have their offices. Using CollectiveAccess, a customizable open-source collections management database, we have described and organized this collection so the Education Department staff can continue to access and share this valuable collection.

ChronoZoom, an online, digital media exploration tool provides a unique approach to digital aggregation; however, it also presents problems in how to effectively find, explore, and collocate information in a meaningful manner. Working with the archives at CERN (the European Organization for Particle Research) I created a domain analysis, resource retrieval, and organization system that created just such a timeline of the history of particle physics. It is an efficient user-centric system that explores digital documents, their influences, and interconnections in innovative ways. The process has demonstrated applications for digital archival management systems, semantic technologies, teaching methodology, academic publishing, and knowledge management.

The Boeing Company Library was among the first corporate libraries to institute an online chat reference service, known as Ask-A-Librarian. The Boeing Library Automated Statistics Tool (BLAST!) is a custom-built, database-driven dashboard for displaying real-time, visualized metrics about the Ask-A-Librarian service. BLAST replaces error-prone data manipulation and inefficient, time-consuming data analysis with instantaneous, attractive graphs for quickly assessing operations. This business-intelligence tool utilizes the best, non-proprietary code libraries and standards, and was created especially by yours truly to be scalable to other library services. The countdown to performance optimization has begun: 3, 2, 1 … BLAST off!

Books in prisons have proven to be beneficial for the economic and mental well-being of prisoners.  However, budgets for prison libraries in the United States have been drastically cut over the past decades, even as prison populations swell.  Books to Prisoners is a Seattle-based non-profit that provides free books to prisoners across the country; it operates on donated time, books, and money to fill the 1,200 requests sent every month.  Due to its limited resources, the organization has never created an inventory of book donations or prisoner requests to assess its own needs.  This project sampled and analyzed the content of donated books and prisoner letters.  This information was used to determine the most critical service gaps and contact appropriate publishers to solicit targeted book donations.  Books to Prisoners is now better prepared to request donations, write grants, and support a national population facing dire information shortages.

The Clark Memorial Library at the University of Portland underwent a major renovation beginning in May 2012 and the library collection was moved to an interim location.  In the new building, the bulk of the physical collection will be located in user-accessible compact shelving.  This project guides the transition of the collection from the interim location to the compact shelving units in the new building.  In order to avoid ongoing collection shifting in the future, the shelving plan was designed based on the anticipated growth of the collection, with larger gaps in subject areas with higher than average expected growth.  The shelving plan will guide the movers as they return the collection to the renovated building in June 2013.

Fighting Words is a collaboration with students and faculty from the Theater, and Film and Media Arts departments at the University of Utah. Actors performed dramatic readings of quotes from American Revolutionary War pamphlets printed on both sides of the Atlantic. This project brought students into the library where they experienced rare books through their own disciplines. Videos of the dramatic readings accompany text and images from the original books on a multimedia website, www.fightingwordsonline.org. Viewers are guided through the exhibition in chronological order, learning about the origins, conflicts, and ultimate conclusions of the American Revolution from the words of the people who lived it. A dynamic website connects users to material and facilitates experiences with rare books outside the library.

UW Libraries’ Special Collections houses numerous rare collections, including a one-of-a-kind photo album detailing the construction of Seattle’s iconic Smith Tower. However, many students and researchers know nothing of the valuable resources in Special Collections. To raise awareness and spark the community’s interest in its unique offerings, Special Collections enlisted our help. Knowing the power of advertising’s most multi-sensory medium, we chose a novel approach to solve Special Collections’ marketing need. We wrote a documentary script about the facts, myths, and stories surrounding the Smith Tower. The script, which has been delivered to KCTS (Seattle’s local Public Broadcasting Station) for potential production, incorporates images and video from Special Collections. The planned documentary will highlight the rare photographs, footage, and ephemera available in Special Collections, bringing increased visibility to Special Collections and the University of Washington.

Open access to scholarly publications nurtures the collaborative nature of impacting research. For biomedical researchers, the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy (NIHPA) also makes it a requirement to ensure continued and future funding of their work. Completed in collaboration with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s (FHCRC) Arnold Library, this project aimed to assess the NIHPA compliance of publications from one biomedical research institute in order to understand their past adherence to this policy and provide recommendations towards optimizing the access of future publications. This included the development and population of a publication-tracking database – enabling the analysis of the institute’s past compliance rate and compliance-related services (library interventions) – and a comparison of these local tracking efforts to the new NIH Compliance Monitor tool. Based on this work, recommendations for the future tracking, assessment, and improvement of the FHCRC’s public-access compliance were provided.