iSchool Capstone

2017

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Pouncing on the Purrfect Database

Specialty Purebred Cat Rescue (SPCR), a nonprofit founded in 1999, is the largest rescue of its kind operating out of the Midwest region of the US. It has a great need for a remotely hosted rescue management software which can be accessed via the internet. After discontinuing its use of a shelter management database in 2015, data recovery was nonexistent. Additionally, SPCR currently does not capture microchip data nor adopter data in electronic form. The Capstone’s agenda was to test several shelter databases, provide a recommendation, develop a metadata guide, and assist with the implementation of the shelter management software.
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Preserving the Institutional History of OMSI

The Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (OMSI) is a large, non-profit museum located in the city of Portland Oregon that started has a simple city hall exhibition and now serves over 1 million visitors. There were three primary objectives driving the “Preserving the Institutional History of OMSI” project: to arrange and describe, increase access, and plan for future success. Accomplishing these goals has created the organizational structure of a successfully functioning archive and set the museum on a path to making its archival material available to the external community.
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Primo Usability Study

Since launching in Fall 2015 as the University of Washington Libraries’ main discovery system, Ex Libris Primo has not been subjected to formal usability testing. Additionally, the UW Triennial Survey showed high dissatisfaction and negative feedback from students, faculty, and staff regarding the current library search experience. To improve their experience using the UW Libraries Search, we conducted user testing, analyzed the data, and provided design recommendations for implementation before the release of the newest iteration of Primo (Fall 2017). Our hope is for these recommendations to make a more user-friendly search system for UW library users.
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Professional Recommendations: Career Services and the LIS Student

Since its formation in 2013, the iSchool Career Services department has proven to work effectively for Informatics & MSIM students, but a persistent challenge remains with students in the MLIS program. Utilizing surveys of current students, alumni, and faculty and a comparison of best-practices across ALA-accredited institutions, this project conducted a review of Career Services in order to identify information gaps between the department and the LIS student body, craft recommendations to address issues discovered, and facilitate an improved experience for both this student population and Career Services staff.
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Reading Between and Beyond the Lines: Analyzing African Children’s Literature

The Ann P Wyckoff Teacher Resource Center (TRC) offers a library of resources geared towards helping educators engage their students with art and culture. With the upcoming remodel of their space, the TRC thought this would be a great opportunity to reorganize as well as reevaluate their current collections for diversity as well as authenticity. Through researching guidelines created by publishing companies and found in online resources and journal articles, we created our own general guideline for evaluating multicultural children’s literature and applied the worksheet to the Fiction African Children’s Literature collection.
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Refresh the Desk: Improving Reference Services

Seattle Pacific University (SPU) requested a review of its declining reference services for the first time in eighteen years. To make recommendations for SPU’s references services, information was collected from three sources. First I reviewed several items: the library itself, current students at SPU, the needs of millennial students, and a literature review of reference service trends over the past ten years. Second, eleven local academic libraries were surveyed to learn how similar institutions are offering reference services. Third, reference service and database use at SPU’s library were reviewed. Based on this information, changes to reference services were proposed.
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Rhema Life Ministry Website Project

Rhema Life Ministry has an interesting information problem, in that they add a complex network of interpersonal interactions to the normal information challenges most organizations face. In my Capstone project, I built on their best practices by applying iSchool lessons about Information Grounds, Knowledge Management, Digital Curation, and of course Website Development. Software used included Photoshop, Lightroom, GitHub, VS Code and Nero. Communication skills and active listening were very important in allowing me to reach my goals, and exceed my sponsor’s expectations as we worked to develop a website that would support current success and future growth.
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Road.IO

Computer Vision, an integral component in the development of Autonomous Cars, requires tens of thousands of tagged images for supervised learning. Currently, established and emerging companies must collect data from scratch, wasting time and money. They find that it is impractical to collate sufficiently geographically and semantically robust corpora effectively alone. Therefore, Road.io crowdsources dashcam footage from drivers which we then process and package in a Data-as-a-Service Model to Autonomous Car Companies. We seek to hasten the commercialization of Self-Driving Cars, become a premier resource for responsive, custom-filtered crowdsourced Data and empower everyone to have a global impact.
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Safely

In large cities like Seattle, there are many situations where people feel unsafe when travelling on foot, particularly at night. While it’s difficult to provide assistance in time to someone who has the misfortune of falling victim to crime, Safely aims to preemptively inform users of dangerous situations before they enter physical proximity of the danger. In a mobile app using map-based visualizations of Seattle Police Department crime logs, we show where crime has recently occurred and where “trouble areas” are. Through this and user-submitted incidents, Safely keeps users vigilant of threats instead of becoming victims to crime. Justine Edrozo (INFO), Kevin Ke (INFO), Brooks Lobe (INFO), Adrian Pacheco (INFO)
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Scribe

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey experienced rapid language reformation that shifted written Turkish from an Arabic script to a Latin-based alphabet. Consequently, some texts were transcribed inaccurately or included subjective editorial decisions. These discrepancies are detrimental to the preservation of Ottoman history and culture. Scribe mitigates the faith gap between Arabic and Latin-based Turkish manuscripts by standardizing the transcription workflow. Our solution offers dynamic verification of transcriptions’ integrity by facilitating the comparison of original Ottoman text with Latin Turkish. Scribe maintains the authenticity of primary source texts in order to preserve Ottoman tradition and literature.