Meet ODL’s 2019 Interns

Published in

Open Data Literacy

4 min readJul 11, 2019

For three summers running now, the Open Data Literacy (ODL) project has placed graduate students into open data internships throughout the state of Washington, thanks to a generous IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program grant. These internships consist of various experiences, including data analysis and visualization, dataset publication and cleaning, open data engagement, and more. ODL is proud to say that these internships have resulted in jobs offers for several students, and have paved the way for many more opportunities due to the invaluable experience they provide.

For 2019, ODL has five summer interns working throughout the state on dataset publication, data management plans, data visualization, metadata improvement, and open data curation by libraries.

Meet ODL’s 2019 Intern Cohort

Publishing Library Datasets

Intern: Lillian Curanzy
Sponsor: Asotin County Library
Project: Publishing library data on data.wa.gov

Lillian has been interning for two quarters with ODL and the Asotin County Library in southwestern Washington to launch open data initiatives and publish library data as open data on data.wa.gov. During the spring, much of Lillian’s work focused on interfacing with various Asotin County government organizations to determine what data they might be able to release as open data. You can read about Lillian’s previous work in her post, ‘Persuading the Gatekeepers.’

This summer, Lillian is turning her attention to helping the Asotin Library select and publish their own library data, in hopes that the information gathered will inform collection development, material type use policies, outreach activities, and other programming decisions. One of the main goals of the project is to establish a process for identifying useful library datasets, work that will be relevant to other libraries within Washington state and across the country.

Lillian Curanzy is a student in the Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Washington, who also works with ecological data for an academic library.

Managing Transportation Data

Intern: Joan Hua
Sponsor: Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT)
Project: Developing data management plans and defining best practice

In her work with WSDOT, Joan Hua is reviewing the state of data management plans in transportation organizations, and developing best practices and templates for the management of WSDOT data assets. One of the project’s primary goals is aligning WSDOT practice to transportation sector best practice, in anticipation of future requirements to make research data openly accessible. As more government departments move toward open by default, this work may inform data management planning at similar agencies and beyond.

Joan Hua is a student in the Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Washington. She has formerly worked in instructional design in academic libraries as well as in music and cultural heritage, and is interested in technical, ethical, and social justice issues in open data publishing.

Assessing Dataset Quality

Intern: Andrew Mckenna-Foster
Sponsor: Washington State Library (WSL)
Project: Exploring how to improve datasets on data.wa.gov

With nearly 500 datasets, the Washington state open data portal has a large quantity of open data. In collaboration with the Washington State Library, Andrew Mckenna-Foster is focusing on ensuring that data is of high quality. Of interest to the open data community as a whole, one main goal is to understand how the state portal is perceived and actually used by its users, potentially shedding light on how to improve open dataset circulation, a topic of interest to both the Washington State Library and many other open data portals.

Andrew Mckenna-Foster is a student in the Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Washington, who hopes to pursue data curation as a career. His background is in ecology, museums, and environmental education.

Transforming Data for the Library

Intern: Karalyn Ostler
Sponsor: Seattle Public Library (SPL)
Project: Converting data relevant to the library into actionable intelligence through visualizations and reports

Moving beyond census data, Karalyn Ostler is assisting Seattle Public Library to identify relevant open datasets that could assist frontline librarians in their work. In addition to assessing and identifying this data, Karalyn will transform the data into human-readable formats such as visualizations and reports. As this project aims to determine what open data is of service to public librarians and library staff, insights may emerge that inform data analysis for libraries at large.

Karalyn Ostler is a student in the Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Washington, who was recently certified as Carpentries Instructor, and is interested in data science and coding.

Improving Metadata for Open Data

Intern: Kaitlin Throgmorton
Sponsor: City of Seattle
Project: Adding column descriptions to open datasets and defining metadata best practice

While the City of Seattle’s open data portal, data.seattle.gov, hosts more than 200 datasets, many of them are without complete metadata, particularly column descriptions. Kaitlin Throgmorton is working to assess and improve metadata quality, as well as populate open datasets with column descriptions. One of the main goals of this project is to improve discoverability and accessibility of Seattle open data, in hopes that more users can find and reuse the data.

Kaitlin Throgmorton is a student in the Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Washington. She’s also ODL’s research assistant, and she’s interested in open data, digital librarianship, and data curation.

Learn About Past Internships

If you’re curious about what ODL interns have achieved in the past, read some of our previous blog posts, including:

Stay Tuned for More

Over the summer, our interns will be posting about their experiences right here on the ODL blog. Stay tuned for updates about what they’re learning, and how it might apply to improving open data literacy for all.