iSchool Capstone

Award Winner

2014

Git Music: Music Collaboration

A large aspect of creating music is collaborating with others. Most musical collaborations occur within physical proximity to each other because few tools allow for collaboration from afar. Git Music allows for musical collaboration to take place online. Specifically, we created an easy to use website that people use to discover and download others’ musical projects. Our service provides people with the ability to browse, upload, and download musical projects. Each song also contains an informational visual that displays its download and upload history linked to each artist. We gauged our success by surveying users to find the ease of use and overall satisfaction with the website. By developing a platform for people to download and upload their musical projects, we provide an avenue for artists to easily collaborate their music together.

Hierarchy Management Platform Interactive Training

“Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without talking about the other.” – Bill Gates As Information Technology is growing at a rapid pace, more companies realize technology has become more of a game changer that can improve business processes, and new business models can create significant new opportunities. Introduction of new technology into the workplace requires staff training. My project is to work with Cisco staff to create Interactive Training Materials that are hyper-intuitive and user-friendly for Hierarchy Management Platform (HMP), a tool which allows users to view and perform various actions on hierarchical data in several different formats. The overall vision of HMP is to establish an enterprise level self-service platform to provide holistic insight into hierarchical structures through Single Source of Truth for hierarchies.

Holistic Collection Development for Philosophy

Our project was assisting the new Philosophy liaison by revising the Philosophy collection development policy. To aid our revision, we performed a collection assessment and a user needs survey. We discovered unused parts of the collection, especially among the foreign language materials. We also identified services our patron group strongly desired, such as the PhilPapers database. Based on this data, we rewrote the policy. Our policy will allow the Libraries to better manage this portion of their collection and thus serve their users efficiently and effectively. Our project may possibly serve as a template for future collection development projects at the UW Libraries.

Improve Your Odds: PEACOCKS and the Evolution of Skillset Matching

Skillset matching is essential when organizational demands evolve, and new project opportunities arise. Alignment of people to meet changing needs is often based on instinct and tribal knowledge rather than optimized and informed by relevant data. Investing in people as valuable business assets requires knowledge of current skills, and awareness of future opportunities to align interests with growth. University of Washington Information Technology (UW-IT), like many large organizations, has limited visibility into the vast skillsets, experience and interests of its numerous staff. PEACOCKS provides a framework and tool prototype that systemizes human characteristics such as skills, experience levels, and growth interests, then applies a taxonomic schema to match project requirements with optimal team members. PEACOCKS is a vessel for collecting and organizing valuable knowledge and insight into staffs’ talent, experience, and growth potential. Built for UW-IT, this prototype is a customizable foundation that could be leveraged by other organizations.

Improving Metrics for Library Comparisons

With approximately 9,000 public library systems across the United States, the Seattle Public Library (SPL) faces the challenge of identifying a network of similar library systems for collaboration. The current comparison and analytics are somewhat basic and only take into consideration traditional library measures. These measures do not capture the complexity of the diverse communities in which the libraries are rooted. The goal of this project is to build on these measures and incorporate demographic data to enable a holistic comparison. Additionally, rigorous statistical analysis methods will be applied to the data in order to improve the accuracy of results. By identifying and collaborating with similar libraries, SPL will be more effective at serving its community.

InfoHub: Revamping the Information Seeking Processes and Behaviors of the Production Resource Training Organization (Code 900T)

Intercollegiate Athletics Leadership (IAL) Database

The IAL Database is a storage and retrieval system for identifying the leadership (head coaches, university presidents, etc.) and institutional movement patterns of Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) programs. Using this application, IAL researchers will be able to evaluate the average term and turnover of the leadership of FBS programs, providing UW and other institutions the opportunity to make informed decisions on future contracts. This system provides a lens for institutions, as well as the public, to begin to understand what has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. Our team took the previously disjointed processes that included paper based records and spreadsheets, and centralized everything into one database with an intuitive web-interface. This web-application now allows the IAL staff to easily manipulate data and generate custom visualizations and reports to further their understanding of the phenomena known as the coaching carousel.

iSchool Digital Asset Management

Over the past year the Information School’s Communications Department has experienced an increased ingestion of digital photographic material; these images, which total over 5,000, were being stored on an internal network drive with no standardized naming, organizational schema structure, or embedded metadata information. As these images are imperative in promoting the iSchool’s accomplishments, achievements, advances, and offerings—in a variety of print and digital media sources—the Communications Department sought to create a digital asset management system. By fashioning hierarchal structures, naming and taxonomy standards, and metadata templates, all of which are compatible with Adobe products, I was able to create a digital asset management system and organizational structure that is mindful of its current and future users. Ultimately, this will allow for the photographic content to be more easily accessible all while stimulating workflow and collaboration in promoting the iSchool brand. How are your digital assets working for you?

Jefferson County Jail User Needs Analysis

Despite the Jefferson County Jail’s proximity to the city’s public library, no formal relationship currently exists between the two organizations. In order to better serve a currently unserved population, a user needs analysis was conducted on the jail for the purpose of informing the library about possible outreach opportunities. This analysis identified the scope of programs and services currently available to inmates while they are incarcerated and upon release, as well as community organizations that are currently providing programs and services at the jail. The analysis also discovered gaps in the current services and programs being offered to inmates. Identifying these gaps better enables the library to develop an outreach program that is relevant to the jail population.

KEXP Schema Design & Media Ingest

Seattle based radio station KEXP, a renowned music discovery powerhouse, acts as a launching pad for artists and as a go-to source for music enthusiasts worldwide. This reputation has been achieved despite their library and archives remaining in underdeveloped information silos without a unified approach or management system. To address this problem KEXP is investing in a new media asset management system to act as a central place where all assets can be ingested, processed, stored, indexed, searched and accessed. This project aims to ease access and bring curator and listener discovery to new and previously unimagined levels by developing a metadata schema capable of encompassing the entire collection. With the schema complete, focus can shift to an ingest plan for KEXP’s collections and an automated, human-supervised, metadata cleanup process. These efforts will improve user experiences, yield new insights into the collection and unlock value currently dormant in the library.