Student Spotlight Series

You may be surprised to hear that before you can access a library resource when you need it, a lot of work must be done to get that resource into the UW Libraries catalog. A whole department of librarians, staff, and students are quietly working away behind the scenes to get new resources into the catalog and to find innovative ways to enhance the Libraries’ metadata. This series of blog posts will highlight our brilliant student employees and the work they do to make your tasks of searching, identifying, selecting, and obtaining library resources easier and more effective.  

Student Spotlight #1: Melissa Morgan

When Melissa Morgan was accepted into the MLIS program at the University of Washington Information School, she expressed interest in volunteering with the University of Washington Libraries. Melissa’s undergraduate work at the UW demonstrated that she was an exceptional student, having earned a Bachelor’s of History with honors and won the UW Libraries’ Library Research Award Grand Prize in 2018. In April 2019, she joined the University of Washington Libraries Linked Data Team, an informal group within the Cataloging and Metadata Services Department (CAMS) focused on semantic web projects, with the aim of gaining some linked data experience. Linked data (or semantic web data, or RDF (Resource Description Framework)) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries.

Linked data is exciting for libraries because it makes relationships between things described on the web computer-readable and more shareable and discoverable across information repositories through integration with the open web. Once she joined the Linked Data Team, Melissa hit the ground running. She began participating in the Libraries’ Linked Data for Production (LD4P2) Mellon Foundation subgrant project and familiarizing herself with linked data analysis, application profile development, and collaboration using GitHub.

Melissa’s remarkable ability to learn new skills quickly and on-the-fly earned her a paid student position as a Linked Data Specialist for the duration of her MLIS study. Under the supervision of Theo Gerontakos and Benjamin Riesenberg, Melissa proactively took responsibility for several areas of highly technical work, much of which involved designing innovative workflows using programming languages she was not yet familiar with. She quickly became one of the most technically skilled members of the Linked Data Team and began contributing at a professional level. One example of Melissa’s outstanding work was a large-scale data conversion project, described below by Benjamin Riesenberg, Metadata Librarian:

“Melissa wrote thousands of lines of Python code to implement ontology mappings and convert data, developing expertise in the mapping language specification and communicating directly with developers to improve the open source specification. Another of her significant contributions to this project was the creation of Python code for parsing human-readable mappings and converting these to RML syntax.” 

-Benjamin Riesenberg, UW Libraries Metadata Librarian 

Melissa collaborated with the Linked Data Team on several such projects, picking up programming languages and learning linked data ontologies quickly in order to solve practical problems in creative ways. Melissa showed herself to be a capable workflow designer and project leader during her time as a student employee.

After assessing project goals, identifying and learning the skills required to solve problems, and learning them quickly, Melissa designed effective workflows and patiently taught new skills and workflows to other Linked Data Team members. She is a skilled writer, and wrote a blog post on her RML project that helped us explain the work to colleagues in non-technical positions. Melissa’s work as a student employee was so helpful to the Linked Data Team that the Libraries kept her on as a temporary library technician after her graduation from the MLIS program. During that time, Melissa continued her linked data work and also studied traditional cataloging with Crystal Yragui, a science cataloger in CAMS. Melissa learned to create catalog records using national cataloging standards and controlled vocabularies.

As with Melissa’s other work, her cataloging was superb. The experience and skills developed as a student employee were foundational to forging her career in the field of librarianship. She is now the full-time Cataloging & Metadata Specialist at Pacific Lutheran University. We are proud of Melissa and grateful for the time she spent at the UW Libraries!

Join Us! 

We are currently hiring for a similar student position – Cataloging and Metadata Services – Linked Metadata Student Specialist! If jobs like Melissa’s sound interesting to you, or you are just curious about other student jobs in the Libraries, visit our Student Jobs page! 

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Benjamin Narkmon (‘2024)

During my junior year at UW, I had the privilege of working  at Tateuchi East Asia Library as the Japanese Collection Student Specialist. A good deal of my time there was spent working on the Gaihozu collection. Gaihozu are essentially World War II maps created or stolen by the Japanese military. As my time here comes to a close, I wanted to reflect on my experience working with the Gaihozu. 

The Gaihozu maps at UW Libraries were found by chance in 2014 when Map Collection Librarian, Matt Parsons, was moving the Seattle Times’ subject files from the Map Collection to the Microform & Newspaper Collections. One of the student assistants, a native Japanese speaker, recognized the value of this Gaihozu collection and brought it to the attention of Japanese Studies Librarian, Azusa Tanaka.[1] The maps were added to UW’s collection through either the Library of Congress or the Army Map Service between 1954 and 1979. 

…this project was one of the most rewarding experiences as a student I have had.  

When my supervisor, Japanese Studies Librarian, Azusa Tanaka, brought up the possibility of onsite work for the Gaihozu project, I was excited. The idea of working with historical documents had always been of interest to me, and I knew that it would be a great experience. At the start of winter quarter 2023, my days in the map room of Suzzallo and Allen Libraries thus began. At first, I was nervous about handling the maps. Was there a special protocol for preserving them? How do I make sure I don’t accidentally damage one? Or so I fretted.

Fortunately, I received excellent training from Azusa and Matt on how to properly work with these special and rare maps. After I became accustomed to handling them, the next thing was deciphering the maps. A large part of my job involved inventorying the Gaihozu, which meant knowing where to find the relevant information on the map. This included the map title, series title(s), organizations that surveyed, printed, or created the map, the years in which these were done, etc. At the beginning, I was always running into problems and was constantly asking Azusa questions. With her help, I eventually found my rhythm and was able to inventory a few hundred Gaihozu and Naikokuzu (Japanese domestic maps). After working on the Gaihozu for so long, I can say that this project was one of the most rewarding experiences as a student I have had.  

The Gaihozu mapped out places across the world in excruciating detail. They came in a wide range of scales from as small as 1:3,000 to 1:6,000,000, with units including Japanese ri, Chinese li, and American meters. They were also in a variety of different conditions, some mylar-wrapped, some thin but surprisingly sturdy, and some so torn that I was afraid that, if handled poorly, I would accidentally rip them. The sheer scale of the Gaihozu, numbering thousands of maps, was chilling. I found myself struck with something akin to awe mixed with horror. These were maps made for the deadliest war in human history.  

Often, I would run a quick search of the place name just to make sure that I got it correct. These searches brought me to places I had never heard of. There were small villages in Mongolia, trading port towns in China, and uninhabited areas in the Kuril Islands, to name a few. It was also common for places to exist with a different status, or no longer exist at all. When looking at places in Japan on the Naikokuzu, many times villages and towns would become incorporated into cities. This is, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting things about maps—that they are constantly changing, with borders, statuses, and names always being redefined.  

Examining each weathered map helped me understand the idea that history is alive, that it is breathing. I remember reading the handwritten notes, seeing the hastily crossed out corrections, and following the brushstrokes of someone who I assume to be a Japanese soldier or military instructor. One map in particular left an impression on me, as I noticed something resembling a coffee spill across it. Immediately, I could vividly imagine a scene in which a groggy Army Map Service worker, tired from reviewing hundreds of maps, accidentally knocks over his coffee mug and panics to clean it up. To think that more than half a century later these maps would make their way through the hands of so many people to end up being worked on by a student here at the UW.  

Examining each weathered map helped me understand the idea that history is alive, that it is breathing.

All this being said, the Gaihozu do not by any means have a commendable origin. They were maps used by Imperial Japan for the purpose of war. However, that does not mean that we cannot learn something from them. They made their way from the hands of the cartographers to the printing press, to the military schools, to the Army Map Service, and to us at UW Libraries. Students and faculty from inside and outside UW use these maps for their research , including several active research projects that have not been published yet.

I enjoyed working on this project with the support of my supervisor, Asuza Tanaka, and I hope that the Gaihozu continue to find their way into the hands of library users as a tool for research, learning and teaching at UW. 

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