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Capstone

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Capstone projects are the culmination of students' learning experience at the iSchool. They distill the knowledge and skills acquired in academic courses and apply them to a real-world project.

Projects Student Information Become a Sponsor 2025 Event Info

Award-Winning Capstone Projects

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Switching Your DEI-ET: A project to Standardize Diversity Reports

Our project introduces a unified diversity framework," a standardized approach to reporting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) metrics within the tech industry. Recognizing the current inconsistencies and confusion in DEI reporting, we are establishing a common standard to enhance transparency and accountability across the sector. This initiative aims to streamline how comp
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Workplace Equity: Optimizing Data-Smart, Equity-Centered Work Environments

GEN, an organization that promotes gender equality in the workplace, works with organizations to help them become ‘GEN-certified’. These organizations face issues with the project management and organization structure of their certification process. Organizations have difficulty managing projects, which makes the certification process longer. This contributes to an increase
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SIFF: Building Your Archive From The Ground Up

Phase II of the SIFF capstone focused on preparing items for the online archive. This process involved scanning, photographing, and cataloging the digital and physical items in SIFF’s collection. These items would populate the online archive once made available not only for the general public but also for future archivists and researchers interested in film history and film f
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Building a Trauma-Informed Workplace to Support Library Staff

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
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Capstone is the culmination of students’ learning experience at the iSchool. For their Capstone projects, Informatics, MLIS, and MSIM students work independently or with sponsors to identify real-world information problems. Then, they develop the approaches and methods needed to address these problems, conduct the research, and finally present their findings in both oral and written formats. Students collaborate with faculty researchers or diverse sponsor organizations from the public, private, and non-profit sectors. While students are encouraged to work in teams of their choosing, individual projects are also welcome.

Students identify projects and potential sponsors during the Autumn quarter (September-December). Work on Capstone projects then begins during winter quarter (January-March) and is completed during spring quarter (March-June).

The final piece is the Capstone Gala event at the end of May. Students present their projects to an audience of faculty, friends, family, colleagues, industry partners and sponsors, as well as a panel of judges who evaluate the projects for a number of awards. The Capstone Gala is the iSchool's most popular and prestigious event of the year. Read our recap of the 2024 event. 

We invite iAffiliates and community partners to work with our students to tackle a complex information challenge in their organization. By partnering on a Capstone project, you can advance your innovation goals while supporting student success and getting a chance to evaluate future talent. Learn how to partner with iSchool students on a Capstone project.

Information for students presenting at Capstone.

Questions: Email iCapstone@uw.edu.

 

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