This capstone presentation provides a high-level summary of Corey Cherrington's work building a digital archive for the Celtic Arts Foundation in Mount Vernon, WA. To complete this goal, I have created an archive for the Celtic Arts Foundation’s historical materials (physical and born-digital) and enacted a long-term plan to stabilize the records involved in this archiving project. Key areas of focus are: Digital Preservation, Digital Asset Management, Information Architecture, and user experience design.

From the 1960s to 1990s, Plattsburgh had a vibrant culture of concerts and performances, playing host to rock groups and to speakers that were touring the Northeastern US and Quebec. Many influential artists visited the local SUNY Plattsburgh campus. For my Capstone project I focused on a period of time (1980s and 1990s) and interviewed five former students and local Plattsburgh residents. We talked about their experiences at these events and more broadly about their lives living in this town. I am creating an online exhibit showcasing these interviews and the events that the alumni reminisced about.

This project entailed item-level cataloging of rare 78rpm shellac discs from the Offenbacher Mozart Collection at the UW Music Library, with a focus on materials recorded before 1923, which entered the public domain in 2022. After complete and accurate bibliographic records had been created, additional research and data remediation allowed a previously unidentified set of audio files to be associated with metadata and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Cataloging physical and digital elements from this unique research collection has created an unprecedented level of access to rare sound recordings from the early 20th century.

The Seattle Opera Costume Shop has over 1300 linear feet of costume items, ranging from tricorn hats to corsets to feathered bird tails, but lacked a comprehensive inventory of its stock. The Costume Database project aimed to tackle a fraction of this problem by creating a database of its rental stock. The new cloud-based database describes, tracks and links costume changes, actors, characters, individual costume items, and more for better access and searchability for shop staff, designers, and outside opera companies.

When the pandemic lockdown closed public libraries across Washington state, staff had to turn on a dime and evaluate their services and programs catering to users who could no longer access these spaces. Washington State Libraries collected data about services added or modified to accommodate patrons. Our team curated data for 60 city, rural, and island libraries in Washington state and presented our results in the form of a curated dataset, a data curation protocol, and a report. This collection serves as an archive of COVID-19 and 21st-century history and helps libraries and other public institutions prepare for future disasters.

Though the value of collection digitization was well understood, the Mason County Historical Society, like many rural cultural institutions, lacked the funds, support, and knowledge to properly create, tag, and manage their digitized holdings. This project proposes an intuitive workflow for attaching metadata that will follow the artifact through its physical and digital lifecycle. New workflows allow the current MCHS team to tag their digitized artifacts with metadata sans programming knowledge, leading to enhanced accessibility and community engagement.

Many people have piles of papers and photos that they would like to digitize, but they don't know where to start. Family Document Digitization is a website that takes users step-by-step through the process of digitizing, storing, and sharing their letters, photos, diaries, and more. The website features blog posts on how to digitize, store, and share their documents using accessible equipment, free applications, and household objects. The project sponsor is Cook Memorial Library in La Grande, Oregon, a rural public library serving users of all ages.

Grievers Library is a non-profit working to provide free bereavement literature to those who need it most, through free book boxes dispersed throughout Seattle. In developing this library further, I have expanded the physical collection, created a highly accessible tagging system with grieving users in mind, and curated online booklists that allow users to borrow recommended titles from their own public library. Living with a loss is overwhelming, but the search for support and comfort does not need to be.

During my Capstone project, I prepared archival assets in the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection to become publicly available on UW's Special Collections website. Preparation included assigning item-level metadata to over one hundred digitized accessions of Sephardic community history materials. I implemented metadata standards set by the Sephardic Studies Program in collaboration with UW Libraries, which leaned on Dublin Core, RDA, and local standards to make UW Special Collections’ first collection with non-English materials of mixed media discoverable. This project laid the foundation for publishing this singular collection of specifically Sephardic archival material, challenging dominant narratives of North American Jewish life.

Locating a concise material history of the book can be challenging due to the breadth of materials available. University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Rare Books and Book Arts curatorial area wanted a better way to display the vast items in their collections, while also providing information to people interested in the field. In response, we created an online interactive exhibit along with a physical exhibit that depicts and describes materials, tools, and techniques used in Western Europe and the United States through the 15th to 19th century. This provides an entry point for researchers through terminology and examples.