The Svoboda Diaries Project is a digital humanities collection of 49 diaries that cover the life of Joseph Svoboda as he traded up and down the Tigris river in the Ottoman Empire during the late 19th century. We’ve been working to standardize their implementation of TEI, updating the existing TEI to fit current standards and creating guidelines and future work guides to help direct implementation of the metadata on a broad scale.

Bellevue High School has yearbooks (The Beacon) going back to 1924 stored in the back room of the Library. The older yearbooks are fragile and important to the history of BHS, so it is important for stakeholders to be able to access them. I created an Online Archive complete through 1950 so that anyone can access our Beacon collection at any time without negative consequences for the materials. This project makes a difference for our Bellevue community because now students, staff, alumni, and community members can access these historical documents and learn about the history of BHS.

In 2020, the Lake Washington Institute of Technology library, with their DEI department created the Diversity and Social Justice collection. While the initial work of adding books to the collection was finished, there was much left to be done, including writing a collection development policy and creating finding aids to help students find books within the collection. Our team was able to complete these tasks, as well as establishing collection assessment guidelines and performing an assessment. We believe that, not only have we helped advance the college’s DEI goals, we have helped make the library a more accessible place.

GSK’s Heritage Archives maintains the research of Nobel-laurate and biochemist Gertrude Elion. Despite the importance of Elion’s collection, it was hard for archivists to access due to highly scientific terminology, lack of organization, extent, and deteriorated state. To address this problem, I arranged, labeled, and rehoused the physical collection into archival storage containers and created a finding aid that featured a breakdown of Elion’s research. To prevent similar occurrences with future scientific acquisitions, I created a processing guide for research collections. Through this work, users can now confidently access Elion’s and future collections, regardless of their own scientific backgrounds.

The Tutankhamun Centenary: 1922 – 2022 website hosts a collection of Howard Carter’s personal documents and articles from the Times of London describing the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb. The wealth of information related here had been out of public view for the past 100 years, so this project sought to make these documents accessible to both academics and the curious public. We learned how to use digital tools and platforms to create an online archive; we learned how to document,preserve, and present historical materials; we created metadata and a keyword list; and we integrated our archive into an interactive timeline.

Accessing comprehensive course information before registration is critical for UW students to select courses that best satisfy student needs and interests. However, our research indicates that over 60% of students express that course information is limited on current solutions, such as MyPlan and Rate My Professors, and most end up asking friends for course recommendations. By leveraging official data from Course Evaluation Catalog, we aim to empower students’ understanding of courses’ content, difficulty, workload, and peer evaluations. With UW Course Expert, students can optimize their course selection and enhance their academic potential.

Library of Congress Subject Headings perpetuate the biases of the sources used to establish them. For Indigenous and other peoples, standard research practices using written reference sources may result in subject terms that do not reflect what people call themselves or wish to be called. Changing our approach to gathering and prioritizing information can result in more ethical and accurate representation of people and peoples in library catalogs.

We acknowledge that librarianship is subjective, but subjectivity invites potential for artistry, esotericism, provocation which I feel is sorely underexplored. My project encompasses four works of library art - art which critically and creatively engages with the theory, practice, politics, culture, technology, and mechanics of libraries and information. My work includes exploratory information technology and design experiments and ideological messaging, but above all it is art, aimed at intangible enrichment of the self and others.

Population projections are estimates of the future population. As part of planning, states and localities across the country develop population projections on a regular basis, but methods and resources differ by area, making quality difficult to evaluate. This State and Local Population Projections Database, stored as part of the Applied Demography Toolbox, brings together state and local population projection information and materials from different sources through survey responses and file sharing. The database can be used by population projection developers and researchers for the study and analysis of population projection methods and associated uncertainty.