The National Runaway Switchboard estimates that on any given night there are approximately 1.3 million homeless youth living unsupervised on the streets, in abandoned buildings, with friends or with strangers. At the same time, general statistical software is usually unaffordable for non-profit youth caring organizations. Finally, lack of person-focused statistics makes it hard to provide person-focused caring. The SYM reporting system was developed to help Street Youth Ministries by providing an overall view of activities, generating impact reports to sponsors, and detecting the young people who need immediate care, thus hugely improving the efficiency of resource allocation.

What are people saying about the library? The Seattle Public Library engages patrons in a variety of ways and encourages people to comment on library services. Due to the volume and various channels of incoming comments, it is hard for library staff and leadership to manually manage comments. To solve this problem, our team created the Canary Comment Management System. This is a new, stand-alone, centralized system to collect, store, manage, and share comments. Through features such as tagging, searching, and reporting, our system gives a fuller picture of when comments happen, where they come from, how frequently they happen, and what they are about. For leadership, it will help the Library identify issues and trends, and guide decision making. For staff, it will improve timeliness, accountability, and collaboration. For the organization, our solution represents a more efficient way to manage public resources to help the community. 

Have you ever held a musket ball or a three-foot long walrus tusk? Ever wondered what a sad iron is, and how it was used? Artifacts like these are just a few of the more than 600 items the Museum of History and Industry uses in support of its programming for children and families. With curriculum covering everything from the Coast Salish Tribes of Puget Sound to Century 21, the Seattle World's Fair, MOHAI's programming brings local history to schools throughout Puget Sound. With the museum's move to their new location this collection is now at a storage facility in Georgetown, across town from South Lake Union where Education staff have their offices. Using CollectiveAccess, a customizable open-source collections management database, we have described and organized this collection so the Education Department staff can continue to access and share this valuable collection.

Our project consists of the development of a system that aims at helping the non-profit organization Seattle Tilth to keep in touch with students that have graduated from one of their programs. Until today, our sponsor did not have any formal way of contacting their alumni, and any communication that happened was merely informal. Our research with current and former students showed that the best mix of media was e-mail, SMS and Facebook. We then built a communication system managed via Salesforce. Our sponsor will provide useful information through these channels on a regular basis for engaging alumni; structured surveys to gather information about the current status of the alumni will also be sent.

The Boeing Company Library was among the first corporate libraries to institute an online chat reference service, known as Ask-A-Librarian. The Boeing Library Automated Statistics Tool (BLAST!) is a custom-built, database-driven dashboard for displaying real-time, visualized metrics about the Ask-A-Librarian service. BLAST replaces error-prone data manipulation and inefficient, time-consuming data analysis with instantaneous, attractive graphs for quickly assessing operations. This business-intelligence tool utilizes the best, non-proprietary code libraries and standards, and was created especially by yours truly to be scalable to other library services. The countdown to performance optimization has begun: 3, 2, 1 … BLAST off!

Most of us have experienced the frustration of not knowing what to order in a Chinese restaurant, due to limited information on their menus, and as a result, end up choosing the typical “Chicken Chow Mein” dish over and over. To solve this dilemma, we developed Dining Menu, a web based application that displays additional information of local Chinese restaurant menu items, to help consumers to be more informed before they decide on their order. Specifically, our web app supports filtering capabilities, displays ingredients used in a menu item, as well as other health and allergy related information, and can be accessed anywhere and anytime.

The Seattle Interactive Media Museum (SIMM) is a non-profit corporation dedicated to being the leading reference institution in archiving and exhibiting the ever-evolving world of digital interactivity to the public. Designed for curious amateurs as well as industry professionals and academics, the SIMM has several goals: 1) housing interactive exhibits that showcase both the history and future of interactive media, including a walk-through history of video gaming, 2) developing and maintaining the world’s largest physical and online collection of artifacts from the interactive media realm and 3) providing a comprehensive and publicly available online library of interactive artifacts.  These goals are backed by a state-of-the-art cataloging and collection system co-developed by the SIMM and a graduate studies program at the UW’s iSchool.

Open access to scholarly publications nurtures the collaborative nature of impacting research. For biomedical researchers, the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy (NIHPA) also makes it a requirement to ensure continued and future funding of their work. Completed in collaboration with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center’s (FHCRC) Arnold Library, this project aimed to assess the NIHPA compliance of publications from one biomedical research institute in order to understand their past adherence to this policy and provide recommendations towards optimizing the access of future publications. This included the development and population of a publication-tracking database – enabling the analysis of the institute’s past compliance rate and compliance-related services (library interventions) – and a comparison of these local tracking efforts to the new NIH Compliance Monitor tool. Based on this work, recommendations for the future tracking, assessment, and improvement of the FHCRC’s public-access compliance were provided.

Most healthcare institutes have complicated step-by-step operation procedures to ensure safety and privacy protections. Reporting used in routine tasks for healthcare institutes must be customized to meet urgent needs within these organizations. To meet these needs, our project presented a solution using a high-scalability reporting tool: SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), connecting directly to the UW medical database. With SSRS, complicated data extractions can be handled without end users’ involvement; hundreds of reports can be customized and delivered within few seconds.

In 1997 the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, acquired the private library of the institution’s founder, Dominique de Menil. Since then the library has been housed in an offsite location which makes staff access to it inconvenient and public access impossible. Consisting of about 1,500 items, the library had no formal list or inventory nor was the library publicized. Working with the Menil Collection Library I increased the usability and accessibility of the private library by conducting an inventory and creating searchable finding aid. Now Menil staff, scholars, and visitors will be able to discover what is in the founder’s library including many items found nowhere else in the U.S. This finding aid will also help the librarian manage the special collection.