Public libraries exist to provide equitable access to information, which requires continuously working with communities to understand their needs. My Capstone is part of SPL’s efforts to involve community members in their website redesign process. This project asks, “Who, taking into account language and digital access barriers, does not use spl.org, and why?”. To answer this question I analyzed data from SPL surveys and worked with branch libraries and community centers to design and run qualitative research sessions. My deliverables include data towards my research question and recommendations for conducting future SPL design research projects.

Public funding has always been an important part of the definition of a public library. Public libraries have seen a decline in funding, relying on a mixture of external types of funding to keep services running. With state and local governments facing financial pressures, some public libraries have explored alternative ways to maximize funding, by forming independent library districts. This model gives districts flexibility in increasing property taxes or other taxes at the municipal level – the primary method of collecting funds. This project reviews any previous research or data to determine if this long-held assumption is correct.

StreamSurfer addresses the issue of online legal streams being difficult to find, and users not knowing which sources are legal or illegal. For example, if a user were to search for a movie or TV show on a popular search engine they’d get legal and illegal results as well as non-stream results. StreamSurfer solves this by creating a search engine specifically for online legal streams of movies and TV shows. Users can search for a show or movie, returning back links to online legal streams for that show or movie, as well as information about the movie or TV show.

Mobile technology and digital communication channels are ubiquitous in today’s undergraduate classroom. What impact have they had on the personal relationship between students and their instructors? I conducted a pilot study within the Information School, surveying and interviewing both undergraduates and their instructors. Results indicated that the personal relationship remains authority-based, with both actors striving to maintain the divide, but digital communication opens a new space in which undergraduates and instructors interact, potentially on the professional level. Further study could illuminate this space, guiding higher education toward a better understanding of classroom relationships.

Ensuring the health of shipments is of paramount importance to a Fortune 500 global logistics services company. Project Superbug assists Expeditors in doing exactly that by creating an automated reporting system that provides a data architecture supporting business intelligence and analytics. Precious man-hours are saved through this system, thereby providing analysts with more time to examine shipments. This brings great value to the health care client sector by enabling diagnosis with rapid turnaround times, which in turn creates faster treatment decisions, leading to better patient experience

TellToo focuses on the journey we take as individuals to find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in life. For many of us, technology has changed the way we socialize. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have pushed social interactions to shorter, less personal, and more trivial exchanges. This has left certain core elements of socialization in the dust. Our project focuses on modernizing those elements and building a platform that delivers a more human centric method of sharing and connecting. Our mobile application allows users to tell stories through audio recording and visually navigate chains of naturally related stories.

TellToo focuses on the journey we take as individuals to find meaning, purpose, and fulfillment in life. For many of us, technology has changed the way we socialize. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have pushed social interactions to shorter, less personal, and more trivial exchanges. This has left certain core elements of socialization in the dust. Our project focuses on modernizing those elements and building a platform that delivers a more human centric method of sharing and connecting. Our mobile application allows users to tell stories through audio recording and visually navigate chains to naturally related stories.

9 out of 10 college students report trouble with procrastination, and 7 out of 10 procrastinate because they have difficulty getting started. Tempo provides an easy solution for tracking and getting started on tasks. Simply input your task names, sizes, and due dates and Tempo will automatically prioritize what you should focus on first. You will receive occasional notifications to encourage you to start thinking about your task. When you sit down to work, you will already have an idea of what you need to do and can quickly start working using the pomodoro timer provided by Tempo.

In online news, as in many forms of media, the appearance of content influences the reader, possibly even more than the content itself. Our experiment investigates this possibility further by researching how certain content-supporting attributes, such as links and pictures, affect how judgments are made about unfamiliar news sources, independent of any informative content. Studying how people evaluate the credibility of news sources is important because our society is increasingly turning to online news sources, while simultaneously becoming more adept at creating them. We hope our research will provide new insights into what factors influence what consumers of news believe.

The Judge George Bagley Collection consists of approximately 40 boxes from Bagley’s career as a lawyer and a Circuit Court Judge starting in 1895, when he passed the Oregon bar, and ending with his death in 1935. World events he would have witnessed include the World War I, Prohibition and the stock market crash, as well as significant events in Oregon history. This project started the process of digitizing the collection and uploading the images into PastPerfect5 and then transcribing the documents. Doing this makes the collection searchable for historians and other researchers.