Youth librarians are uniquely able to encourage cultural awareness in the populations they serve. Despite increasing emphasis on cultural competence for librarians, many library science programs have no requirement for such training and librarians have never received instruction in cultural competency. The MAP project seeks to create a central hub for librarians to receive training and to access materials and resources that will provide a culturally rich and welcoming environment in libraries.

The Seattle Public Library’s Special Collections has done a fantastic job of preserving Seattle’s local history, but one of Seattle’s mainstays, its music, has yet to be addressed. This project broke new ground for Seattle Public Library by establishing a foundation for preserving audio recordings as part of the library’s special collections and providing the framework for building a collection in years to come. In addition to writing a collection scope statement, Dylan Joy and Dave Zelonka examined the issues of preservation, copyright, and access in regards to collecting archival audio material and tested a pilot collection. Now equipped with the necessary tools, the Seattle Public Library is closer to providing access to the art and history of Seattle’s jazz music than ever before.

The Museum of Flight Library’s technical files cover everything from aviation history to aircraft technical specifications. The collection’s depth and breadth makes it a potential source of tremendous value. Even noted historians have found materials within their areas of expertise that they did not know existed. However, neglect and disorganization have resulted in underuse. Finding things can be so difficult that researchers tend to avoid using the technical file collection. We analyzed the state of the collection and interviewed its primary users to determine their needs. We made recommendations for reorganizing and maintaining the files, and began implementing the changes. Most importantly, we left the library a procedures manual and other documentation to complete the project and keep the collection usable in the future.

University Advancement drives private support for the UW by fostering strong relationships with donors, and this means keeping donors informed on matters of interest and importance to them. To better provide such information – and improve stewardship of benefactors at all levels – Advancement is developing an online donor portal. We have researched and recommended a plan for pulling news content from multiple sources throughout the university and delivering personalized news to donors in this portal. We identified different news sources, determined the technical capability of each to feed its content to the portal, and performed content audits and analyses. We also assembled a set of tags for indexing this content which facilitates the dynamic selection of items for donors based on their interests and affiliations.

Although the Washington Talking Book and Braille Library has long served the needs of the visually impaired community in Washington state, they find themselves limited with their connections to remotely located patrons. I have proposed a solution in which remotely-located youth patrons can connect with local youth patrons and WTBBL staff by using web-conferencing tools. Web-conferencing tools generally include features such as audible notifications and screen reader support, allowing WTBBL patrons to connect with each other and with WTBBL staff. By connecting with their peers, WTBBL youth patrons build an even stronger network of peers. This network encourages literacy advancement, involvement in library programs and will likely develop important friendships, too.

StorySite is an interactive Google map designed for the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections: Gary Greaves Oral History Digitization Project. StorySite connects digital oral histories with their geographical locations and displays them in an accessible and user-friendly manner. Using historical interviews collected by Gary Greaves (d. 2009), an aspiring journalist and author, the project involved interview deselection (choosing from over 153 available recordings), audio editing (cutting,amplifying, and reducing background noise), metadata development (for arranging and displaying the stories by subject), icon selection, website consultation, and Google map implementation (via JavaScript). The recordings selected for this interactive map were cut into 1-3 minute story clips to echo the most important lessons reflected in the complete collection. These interviews, collected in the 1990s, describe multiple perspectives of the development Seattle went through during the 1950s-90s. This information provides an untold perspective of the history of Seattle that deserves our attention.