In 1969, 89% of kids who lived within a mile of their school walked to school. Today, that number is around 35%. Parents’ concern over the lack of supervision and safety of their children has contributed to this steep decline. Karavan is a mobile application that facilitates group walks, allowing neighborhood children to safely walk to school together with a trusted chaperone. Parents can create group walks they can lead, or join their child to an existing walk. Walking improves children’s health, eases traffic congestion, and strengthens communities, and we hope to make walking to school the norm again!

The King County Library System employs over 1200 staff members in 49 different branches. Our sponsors in the Staff Development Department felt that a formal mentoring program could prove beneficial in such a large, dispersed organization; but to design an effective program they needed information about staff needs and mentoring best practices. Our team gathered this information by conducting focus groups, researching mentoring literature, and benchmarking organizations’ mentoring practices. Taking all that we learned from these investigations, we built a set of recommendations that will facilitate the creation of a successful and sustainable mentoring program at KCLS.

The problem we addressed was that many cosmetics have unsafe ingredients in them and the prolonged use of expired or unsafe products can be harmful for users. Twelve cosmetics are used by the average woman every day, and only one out of seven cosmetics are considered entirely safe. We created a cosmetics tracking system that organizes the user’s cosmetics and tracks the expiration dates, safety of ingredients, and any conflicting allergies to help the user be more health conscious with their cosmetics. Our app makes a difference by leading cosmetic users to use safer products.

Literary Landmarks™ are historically significant locations that pertain to literature and have been officially dedicated by United for Libraries: A Division of the American Library Association. United for Library’s Literary Landmark™ project had two gaps: an incomplete website and a lack of advocacy. To help update the website I edited 120 landmark entries to include a description, dedication date, Partner, and a separate webpage. My advocacy plan consisted of contacting several sites and encourage them to apply for Literary Landmark™ status, and starting an online Literary Landmark™ photo tag.

In the digital age, business success is tied to its ability to leverage technology efficiently. This is especially true for small-medium sized businesses (SMBs) who rely on technology to achieve their business objectives. Notwithstanding, SMBs find it challenging to leverage technology without the right technical direction. This capstone project addresses this challenge through the creation of a technology startup known as LPT Consulting LLC. The startup provides technology consulting and services for SMBs to leverage technology strategically to enhance business operations and achieve business objectives. Our vision is to provide innovative services and to make a positive impact in society.

Messaging services are the go-to platform for sharing links with others. But with over 205 billion messages sent daily, these links get quickly lost in our messaging history. The Lynx web-app offers a solution for users to archive and find links they send and receive. By integrating with a user’s Gmail, Slack and Facebook, Lynx automatically saves links sent and received over these services. The user can then browse recently sent links, tag links for easy searching, and search saved links. Lynx recognizes that sent links have inherent value to the user, and should not get lost in message history.

For my MLIS Capstone project, I examined each item in Scarecrow Video's silent film collection to correctly represent each film title, according to the rules of the Fundamental Requirements of Bibliographic Records (FRBR). Many of the titles reflected only the title of the DVD or VHS, not the titles of the films themselves. Cleaned-up records provide a more accurate reflection of Scarecrow's inventory and rental statistics, and they allow customers to more easily search the in-store database.

The National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NNLM) offers free continuing education and training opportunities related to consumer health. Unfortunately, the demands of the modern work environment make it difficult for library staff to dedicate time to these opportunities. This has left many libraries unaware of, or untrained in, numerous free high quality health resources that can be passed on to the public. To address the problem of time, this project reconfigured the information session for the NIH Senior Health Website. The session was transformed into a “microlearning” module, with 6 short video tutorials that have small amounts of content.

Everyday millions of frequent flyer miles expire. Miles have been proven to be a valuable currency - there are endless possibilities when it comes to earning and redeeming. However, most miles expire and the airlines usually won’t notify the customer. MileageTracker manages miles across all airlines in one place. Our solution syncs all of the user’s miles and displays the balances with expiration dates in their online dashboard. The user is able to glance at all of their miles in one place, including information on when they expire. Custom alerts can be set to notify when miles expire by email.

People often fondly talk about their unique experiences at college but more often than not they also speak of the missed opportunities and things they should have done. Universities however big or small are complex entities bustling with life and activity and it seems fairly impossible to be able to make the most of these opportunities. We at Team Milo decided to create a University wide personalized social media platform to help students, faculty and employees to meet new people, make plans and mobilize!! Our team name and motto is ‘Milo’, a Hindi word which does not simply mean ‘to meet’ but adds the much needed dimension of ‘willingness’ to its meaning. In this age, where our virtual presence is taking over our social presence, we felt it was time to take advantage of the very fact and promote interaction & collaboration on campus and to simply make some new friends and have some fun!