Special Collections currently houses a large donated collection of Historical Children’s Literature that focuses on Indigenous people, approximately 1500 books. Our project centers on how Natives Americans were depicted between the 1930s and 1970s, how their portrayal has changed over time, and what we as information professionals can do to present this data accurately and responsibly in the current day. We approached this by splitting the scope between public libraries, where possible, and academic libraries/special collections, as each of us has different interests and goals but a common purpose of making these historical materials available.

Sleep deficiency affects over 20% of the estimated 300,000 children with arthritis nationwide. The Sleep Self-Management Intervention for Children with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis study at the UW School of Nursing is developing a web-based learning application that will help children be better equipped to improve their sleep quality. The SleepWell skill for Alexa was researched and designed in tandem with this study, for use as a potential tool to provide additional ad-hoc support with sleep. The voice user interface design of SleepWell includes guidance for relaxation techniques, a soothing sound and music library, and tools for developing healthy sleep habits.

It is a nightmare for fundamental securities analysts and portfolio managers to leaf through lengthy corporate filings and call transcripts to gain insights on which stock to invest in. Our project automates this process using NLP tools and generates sentiment/credibility index. These indexes are used to create an all-inclusive dashboard that displays a company’s performance, its overall ranking, ranking within its industry, current trends in the market and popular buzzwords in different industries. The portfolio managers can then use the dashboard to make smarter investment decisions. Do you also wanna make your investments more profitable? Try SmartInvest!

Spectrum is a melting pot of different sources and types of news, all on one website. We challenge individuals to read from multiple sources and categories and encourage users to reflect on their personal reading habits. We challenged ourselves to create a place where people can leave with a more well-rounded understanding of current events in the world we live in. In the end, we hope to impact everyone who comes across Spectrum and inspire individuals to be aware of various viewpoints and generate mutual understanding between persons of different perspectives, and opinions.

2 out of 3 fourth graders in Michigan failed to receive proficient scores in reading. Kent District Library (KDL), in response, is developing a new summer reading program called Summer Wonder in 2020, with the goal of helping youth in underserved areas. How do they know if this new program is working? This project’s goal is to start partnerships, create timelines, research, and form a recommendation for a long-term study. The end result of this project will help KDL understand how to improve Summer Wonder, creating a pathway to learning for those facing barriers.

Our project is a bold undertaking that seeks to combat the advent of over-personalization of news feeds and the inability to see the “bigger” picture within news media. These issues can create echo chambers which lead to increased partisanship and the general spread of misinformation. We created a web application that consolidates the news from different outlets to offer a more in depth analysis of the news media. Through this, we provide our users with conceptual visualizations of a developing story, while allowing users to hone in on topics that interest them and allowing for balanced viewpoints amongst these topics.

The Bellingham Public Library has begun their Strategic Planning process and are interested in gathering the perspectives of the citizens of northern Bellingham, a dense and diverse population with low-income housing and a lack of critical resources, such as food, education, and living space. Through an informal American Library Association Ask Exercise, input was gathered regarding aspirations, needs, and concerns of community members and formed into service recommendations for Bellingham Public Library to better understand the aspirations of this underserved population in an attempt to redevelop services and resources to better support the community’s needs.

We are a mentorship management system that enables organizations such as companies and universities to build meaningful mentorship between their employees/alumni and the tech of tomorrow. Our system handles each step of organizing a mentorship program, right from inviting potential mentors and mentees to signup to matching them using our mentor-mentee matching recommendation system to introducing mentors and mentees to each other and checking in on their progress. The existence of such a platform will help ensure companies can quickly set up their own mentorship programs and make their contribution in giving back to the tech community.

As part of the Oregon Folklife Network’s “Telling Our Stories” online toolkit for educating the public on how to document, archive, and share their history, I created a how-to guide for archiving and retaining value in historic family photographs, using LIS best practices. The guide covers photo preservation basics, looking for themes to assess, organize, and digitize your collection, and collecting and sharing your stories through photos. The "Telling Our Stories" Family Photo Archiving Guide helps individuals to recognize their own stories and connections to history and the value that individual and collective experiences bring to the cultural heritage landscape.