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.

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.

Digital illiteracy persists among adults in the coastal Mississippi area the Jackson-George Regional Library System serves. Adults without computer skills cannot use the Internet to gain employment, access government services, or find healthcare providers. Their lack of basic computer skills is a barrier to accessing government programs that can help them. JGRLS does not have the human power to meet this need. A digital literacy program that trains volunteers to teach digital literacy skils to adults using the public computers and broadband capacity at JGRLS' 8 branches is warranted. The project will lay the groundwork for a digital literacy council.

Consumers are buying IoT devices without understanding their security and privacy implications. Traditional mainstream reviews only showcase device features. Consumers remain uninformed about security, but The Smart Guide hopes to change this. Our solution is a buyer’s guide for smart home devices. It helps consumers make an informed decision based on feature, price, and most importantly security. By factoring in cybersecurity in the rating of a product we hope to drive consumers to purchase safer smart home devices in a smarter way.

Millennials have the lowest voter turnout, despite being the 2nd largest generation of voters. Having identified that millennials are largely unsatisfied with their knowledge in local politics, our project addresses bottlenecks in the political education pipeline. We aim to alleviate voting friction for young adults by providing sharable, eye-catching content, that passively informs viewers on relevant political issues. TL;DR is an automated platform that generates succinct, engaging videos from user input. Government officials can input state initiative information, and create videos that display the given data in an engaging, informative manner, that can easily be distributed on social media.

To learn about the potentials of Virtual Reality, we designed a curriculum for teenagers, called VR Camp, taught over spring break at Snoqualmie Public Library. It was divided into three modules; each exposed students to different ways of interacting with VR and paired those experiences with participatory design activities. This VR program served as a pilot for a larger research project at the UW. Funded by a grant from the IMLS, this project brought VR to incarcerated youth in Snoqualmie Valley. Findings from VR Camp and the larger project will help inform the creation of a library practitioner toolkit.

The Mt. Angel Public Library does not currently conduct outreach in the wider community and their outreach efforts in the past have been limited in scope and impact. Our outreach plan contains a detailed strategy and two different budget proposals for expansion of Mt. Angel’s outreach efforts. The community will benefit from increased contact with the library’s services, and the library will benefit from increased use and impact in the community. Our outreach plan is designed to ensure that everyone in Mt. Angel is aware of and uses all the library services available to them.

In response to a school librarian’s concern about underutilization of library resources and services, we developed surveys to gather baseline qualitative and quantitative data about student and faculty use and expectations of the library. We found that many students and faculty lack the time to seek out meaningful relationships with the library, contributing to inconsistent information literacy instruction and underutilization of library resources and services. We reviewed the data with our sponsor and co-developed ideas for addressing barriers to library usage, including partnering with student groups to brainstorm outreach initiatives and advocating for an integrated information literacy curriculum.

The Public Health Department of Seattle and King County maintains a comprehensive collection of data called the Community Health Indicators (CHI) dataset. These indicators aim to measure health behaviors, health outcomes and demographics of King County residents. The CHI online data portal draws in a broad range of users, including researchers, nonprofits, policy-makers and concerned citizens. However, some users had difficulties navigating and understanding this website. Our team utilized a user-centered design approach to create a three-part solution to tackle these problems. Our solutions include: 1) information reorganization and search functionality, 2) video tutorials, and 3) data visualizations.