Willows Preparatory School (WPS) is a private institution affiliated with Bellevue Children’s Academy in Redmond, Washington. While the elementary school was established in 2000, WPS is only in its second year, therefore, the library is relatively small and consists largely of donated resources. Despite the small size, the new librarian has created an excellent base of resources in nonfiction and a good selection of new and popular books. As an International Baccalaureate (IB) candidate school, with a diverse student population, WPS is looking to add more international and multicultural resources that will both interest the students in their personal reading, support the school’s curriculum, and meet IB standards. With this in mind, my goal was to cultivate high quality international and multicultural resources that the librarian can immediately add to her emerging library.

Investigating the Status of Anime Collections in Public Libraries As anime grows in popularity, so grows demand for access. Anime conventions, such as Seattle’s SakuraCon, bring together fans to celebrate, discuss, and watch anime; and websites such as Crunchyroll provide legal access online. Public access through libraries is also important, particularly to people who cannot attend conventions or pay for streaming services, and to provide this access it is necessary to determine how metadata systems created for print media can be redesigned to accommodate the increasingly visual and mobile nature of global information. Specifically, what are the challenges and needs of developing, cataloging, organizing, and providing access to anime collections in public libraries? This project’s analysis of a survey sent to 248 American public libraries identifies areas where access to anime can be improved. By highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the current systems, this project lays the foundation for future work to create better metadata systems for anime. Thomas Disher—Residential MLIS

What about officiated sports makes them all the same? What makes them different? Perhaps the rulebooks used to govern them can tell. Regulated sports offer controlled environments in which participants operate for fame, fortune, self-improvement, camaraderie, and other reasons. Rulebooks not only shape these environments, but also regulate behavior within them. With society as the oyster and our human passions as grains of sand, how do the official rules of sports help culture our pearls? I took a whack, a shot, a leap into modeling sports, from the perspective of the humble sports rulebook. In my research, I explore why and how to go about deriving a genre-based model of sports. I also identify possible applications of this model serving diverse audiences including scholars, policy analysts, and athletes. Rulebooks have long been used to organize knowledge on sports – what’s needed now is a better way to extract this knowledge.

Currently teachers use tedious methods of note-taking such as paper journals, post-its, general note-taking apps and even memory. With elementary school class sizes increasing as well as the emphasis of individualization, keeping track of every student becomes a significant challenge. To face this challenge, we proposed to build a cloud-based web-application that allows elementary school teachers to quickly take notes on students while also providing skill-tracking and rubric management. The goal of Jot is to provide teachers a note-taking experience that allows them to track various aspects of an individual student. Our application aims to make an impact by ensuring that there are notes taken on each and every student leaving no one behind. By helping organize student notes, skills and creating reminders, we know that Jot will help teachers better guide the future of our children.

We seek to expose young children to diverse groups of people from different cultural backgrounds through an interactive storytelling app. This application will serve as an example that diversity, social awareness, and empathy can and should be incorporated into everything that we do. The interactive aspect of our story app will allow children to make decisions for their characters and see how the consequences affect them and the other characters in the story. Our aim is to have parents download this app for their children and encourage them to play it in order to teach them about stereotypes that currently exist and how they can combat them. We also want parents to guide their children through the stories and educate them on specific social issues as they are following the story.

Currently there is no structured data standard for representing elements commonly found in transmedia fictional universes. To address this information gap, we have created an ontological model that will allow researchers, fans, brand managers, and creators to search for and retrieve information contained in these worlds based on their structures. Our process included a domain analysis and user studies based on the contents of four transmedia works in order to build a new model using Ontology Web Language (OWL) and an artificial intelligence reasoning engine. This model can infer connections between the transmedia elements and will facilitate better search and retrieval of the information contained within these vast story universes for all users interested in them. The result of this project is an OWL ontology that is intuitive for users; can be used by AI systems; and has been updated to reflect real user needs based on user research.

LIBROS is a digital toolkit which was created to address a gap in children’s services in the North Central Regional Library system (NCRL). Although many households in NCRL’s service area are bilingual or Spanish-speaking, the majority of library branches don’t offer dual-language storytime programs. Staff cited two main reasons for this: lack of confidence in their own Spanish skills and not knowing how to select Spanish-language storytime elements such as books and songs. Several employees simply said, “I just don’t think I can do it. LIBROS aims to solve this issue by acting as an online resource where library staff can learn how to incorporate basic Spanish words and concepts into storytime. Interactive modules provide storytime examples, suggested books and media, and downloadable files. The end goal is multifaceted: to empower and encourage librarians, increase library patronage, and touch the lives of families through the magic of libros—books.

Making Connections with Linked Data: Identities and Identifiers at University of Victoria Libraries Robbyn Gordon Lanning (MLIS) Linked data empowers libraries and archives to connect rich stores of local data to global audiences through the use of common identifiers and standards. The University of Victoria (UVic) Libraries possesses over 2.9 million records, each of which uses text strings as resource identifiers. In order to participate in the semantic web, UVic Libraries must prepare its metadata, transitioning its records from textual representations of people, places, and subjects to internationally accessible Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). To assist UVic in meeting this challenge I implemented a study reconciling randomized datasets from each of UVic’s four record repositories to linked data identifiers. This research culminated in a report providing detailed reconciliation results, suggestions to overcome obstacles encountered, and best practice recommendations for future reconciliation work. By assisting UVic Libraries in preparation for transitioning its “strings” to “things”, this project has helped enrich the exposure, interoperability, and accessibility of UVic’s information holdings.