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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

The SE Flow is a chlorine generator currently being developed by a team at MSR Global Health. In the future, the SE Flow will be deployed in countries to be used in clinics for infection prevention and control. We were given an opportunity to work with their team to design and develop an internal administrative dashboard that will help them manage and maintain their devices. In addition, we also developed a website for donors that have donated to this philanthropic cause that allows them to track their devices, hoping to give them a sense of fulfillment and encourage future donations.

One of the popular tools on the Pitchbook platform is their search engine, that allows investors to find what they are looking for from nearly a million records of possible investments. Currently their search engine offers an overwhelming number of search results without any meaningful order, and leaves little room for discovery. Our capstone project attempts to fix that by introducing a relevance factor to rank the search results, and by allowing the user to discover possible investments similar to previous successful investments, made either by the investor himself or by others. This makes search more meaningful and actionable for Pitchbook’s clients.