What do you want to accomplish today? This week? This month? We all have goals, but finding the best method or technique to achieve those goals can be a challenge. Our world is littered with conflicting information about self-improvement; sifting through it is time-consuming and confusing. We want to help people achieve their goals. That is why we built an application to crowd-source this process for our users. Adapt is a social platform for individuals looking to share and test ideas for self-improvement. Once a user has tested a hypothesis, they can report back to the community and share their findings. This data will then be aggregated and analyzed to help users find the most effective and efficient means of increasing performance and accomplishing personal goals.

Attracting Millennial Shoppers Abhaya Pothina(MSIM), Pavani Piduru (MSIM), Resha Manjrekar (MSIM) The millennial generation is the biggest in US History with a major economic impact. Our study marks the first new phase of millennial research at Costco that would impact shopping for millions of millennials. As the Baby Boomer population which is Costco’s largest customer base today declines, its major customer base will gradually shift to the Millennials. In order for Costco to maintain its status as the second largest retailer in the United States, it is integral for Costco to attract young shoppers. Our project is aimed towards conducting field research to study millennial perception, their retail behaviors, lifestyle and needs to understand how Costco can enhance value proposition for millennials. The secondary focus of our research is to determine shopping variations between US-born and foreign-born millennials. Our Capstone project provides Costco with viable recommendations and best practices that align with Costco’s culture and business goals.

Makerspaces— creative environments dedicated to active learning—are a growing trend in libraries; however, without a contingency plan for sustaining makerspaces, the momentum that libraries have harnessed from the “maker movement” could halt to a standstill. Our research took us to Kitsap County, where nearly 258,000 patrons are served by the regional library system. BiblioTEC (Technology, Education, and Community) is an IMLS award-winning STEM learning lab at Kitsap Regional Library. In order to enable the continued success of BiblioTEC as they enter a new phase of development, we created a Pop-Up Makerspace Toolkit for use in public library learning initiatives. We developed a scalable outcome-based curriculum to provide informal learning for at-risk youth and designed transferable models for library learning labs. Through our work in the community we have helped Kitsap Regional Library strengthen their educational outreach and empower patrons to learn, dream, and make.

The Sylvan Way branch, located in Bremerton, Washington, is the largest branch of the Kitsap Regional Library system, and is one of two branches serving the Bremerton area. For this Capstone project, we partnered with KRL to discover untapped patron communities and relationships by analyzing area demographics while utilizing recent assessments of KRL and other library systems. Additionally, we focused on ways to create and strengthen the library’s relationship with the area’s two largest employers, the Department of Defense (comprising of Naval Base Kitsap, Naval Hospital Bremerton, and Puget Sound Naval Shipyard) and Harrison Medical Center. As result of our analysis, the Sylvan Way branch is poised to offer more support in the form of strengthened partnerships and more tailored programs to their existing and new patrons.

St. Luke Parish is a Catholic church and school located in Shoreline, Washington. This project focused on organizing the St. Luke Parish library to increase accessibility for parishioners. The parish owned a large number of books, which are now labeled and arranged on the shelves by subject for ease of use and access. I evaluated the checking in/out system and established a system for getting books from the donation stage into the collection, if appropriate. The creation of this library will be a benefit to the parish by providing increased access to helpful books, especially related to issues dealing with the church. The vision is that parishioners will utilize this library often.

Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) is a nonprofit organization that provides college classes leading to an Associate of Arts and Sciences degree at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in Gig Harbor, WA. Classes are taught by faculty from local colleges and universities with the same academic expectations they would have in a typical college setting. Students work hard to meet and exceed these expectations, but they have limited information resources available to support their studies. We have partnered with FEPPS to address this information gap by creating a small academic library for the students inside the prison. Over 1,000 donated books have been gathered, sorted by subject, and entered into a basic inventory catalog. We have established circulation policies and procedures, and have created collection development and maintenance guidelines. Students are already making good use of the library for class assignments and independent learning.

We are performing a critical examination of the curricula of several of the top Information Schools, as determined by US News & World Report. Our intent is to determine whether these schools are addressing issues of diversity in ways that will prepare MLIS students for the 21st century workplace, where diversity is increasing and increasingly important. Our analysis is based upon the available literature as well as syllabi from the various schools in our sample. We intend to address possible omissions, areas for improvement, and places where diversity-related content can be integrated into already existing classes. We have compiled a resource list for instructors wishing to integrate more diversity-related content into their classrooms.

Though Kitsap Regional Library had comic format collections for Children and Young Adults, comics outside of those collections were spread across Adult Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Biography. These items were difficult for patrons to browse and discover. The shelving caused them to be weeded without having added as much value as they might to the collection. After preliminary catalog searches to identify items that might be added to the new collection, Stacy Wyatt and Lisa Longmire searched each branch to find comic format items. These items were then labeled and added to the collection in the catalog, as well as being relocated to new collection shelving in each branch. This collection is now easily identifiable whether patrons are visiting in person or online. The collection will be able to be specifically monitored to help it grow in a way that will be useful and enjoyable for patrons of Kitsap Regional Library.

Space Needle, LLC is seeking a move to a greener and more efficient electronic billing, invoicing, and records sharing system within the organization, with ability to share outside the organization. The company was seeking a digital process and invoice approval system to convert manual entry and workflow procedures and replace the antiquated format and practices already in place. This Capstone investigated emerging industry technologies surrounding electronic receiving, invoicing, and workflow with particular consideration of processes in document management and department budgeting and approval. Project impact includes elimination of misplaced files or invoices, instant document retrieval and sharing across the company, and a fit with the company’s new Green Initiatives Mission.