This project addresses the need for discoverable and accessible archival materials about Black histories at Occidental College. In the last decade, Oxy students increasingly utilize archival study and the digital humanities to advance their research and progress student movements. The College’s archive is rich with materials, but access is limited due to slow processes towards digitization, lack of finding guides, and loss of digital exhibits. Using Collection Builder, this project builds a framework for a sustainable, publicly accessible digital archive that benefits its target audience and presents a replicable model for other affinity organizations and community archives.

Our capstone project works to address the issue of unaddressed public library staff trauma through a paper and website. These texts overview public library workers’ experience of trauma, defines trauma-informed care, examines its use within the public library setting, and provides strategies to incorporate those principles for public library staff support. Our project serves to educate library staff and the public about the experiences of library workers and as a call to action to incorporate trauma-informed practices into library staff support so that library staff wellbeing is prioritized.

Camano Island has a lot of incredible history and a lot of people who are interested in it but, until recently, had nowhere to connect the two. The Camano City Schoolhouse Archive solves an information need for historians and genealogists on the island, as well as local people who have historic materials they want to donate. We’ve been able to establish the archive, build procedures, and train volunteers so archival work can continue for decades. Now, our space is open for any researcher, and our digital collection is growing every week - which connects people with Camano’s varied history.

This project evaluated Marshall County Public Library’s response to the December 2021 tornado in Western Kentucky. The primary deliverable was a revised tornado response plan for use at the library. Secondary deliverables included a crisis response taxonomy suggestion for the Marshall County Public library website, and a general framework for consideration in climate disaster planning. The Cycle of Disaster Planning and trauma-informed solutions presented here are a synthesis of information gathered about Marshall County Public Library, as well as current disaster management literature.

The “Cataloging Community Stakeholders” allows WCLS staff to catalog information on significant relationships with key community stakeholders in Whatcom County. Staff members can input contact information for community stakeholders, as well as basic information about the organizations, areas of expertise, or topics that they represent. The project took the form of an Airtable where information about key community stakeholders is housed and searched based on criteria determined by WCLS staff. This tool supports outreach and relationship building between WCLS and the Whatcom County Community by centralizing information and easing the burden for new and veteran staff collaborating with community partners.

In the realm of amateur fan archiving, the digital preservation of its fanfiction is held paramount. However, fanfiction is the natural result of its hosting platform, and it is crucial to consider this in its preservation. Through exploring both the history of the tenuous digital space of fan communities and its fanfiction terminology, this series of blog posts reveals three potential solutions to the natural difficulties of preserving context and space: introductions, disclaimers, and emulation. This project can function as a complement to the work of fan archivists to ensure that their efforts are as complete as is feasible.

This capstone project wanted to determine characteristics of materials shared internationally by libraries’ interlibrary loan (ILL) departments, seeking to determine drivers behind such resource sharing and whether any interesting or useful patterns in the practice could be identified. By interviewing institutions who participate in international ILL, we found that the experience, and number of resources shared by the participants varied greatly and were the result of differing circumstances. It was determined that participants faced similar challenges the world over, but that the responsibility ILL teams feel to their users to provide the best access to resources is universal.

Students who work in team projects often experience issues such as poor communication and a lack of accountability. Chīmu aims to reduce negative team experiences by emphasizing communication, responsibility, and feedback. The goal is to start a conversation by providing awareness that issues are occurring. Chīmu does this through critical features that allow teams to understand each other and build trust, set clear expectations, and encourage reflection for building continuous improvements. Chīmu strives to facilitate teamwork that creates a safe environment for students and promotes working through issues in a constructive manner.

Team TechTribe identified a prevalent challenge among the blind and low vision community; navigating cluttered websites. Thus, we’ve developed a transformative solution using GenAI. Our browser extension: ClearView Assist enhances web accessibility by decluttering interfaces. By leveraging voice commands, users can articulate their browsing objectives, prompting ClearView Assist to dynamically filter out irrelevant page elements while highlighting content crucial to the user's input. This significantly reduces the time and effort required by screen readers to locate specific details and exemplifies a proactive approach to inclusive design, promoting digital equity and empowering individuals with diverse visual needs with efficient web navigation.

When grieving it can be difficult to find the time and energy to find resources on grief. The Grievers Library has an EZ Reads section thats purpose is to provide easily accessible quick reads on many types of grief. The goal of our project was to find excerpts for underrepresented categories in EZ Reads. We hope that through this project we can help those going through the grieving process find resources more easily. Grief is something that everyone will experience at least once in their lifetime. It’s inescapable and it’s important to create access to resources that can help.