This Library Life Gabbie Barnes, Residential MLIS Rebecca Fronczak, Online MLIS Erin Vonnahme, Residential MLIS Librarians love to share. Despite our love for sharing ideas among ourselves and our patrons, there’s no single, independent repository available to find library programming across the country. Until now. This Library Life (TLL) is an interactive website where library professionals can share ideas, encouraging users to discover diverse library services and initiatives happening across the country. We’ve done a lot of “behind the scenes” work for this online tool, developing a well-thought out structure and metadata schema which will allow users to navigate TLL with ease. These considerations will make future growth and more customization possible. In short, we’re presenting a digital platform that aggregates and visualizes just how dynamic, creative, and vital libraries are to their communities. Just like the library itself, This Library Life is an environment that encourages engagement, interaction, and community growth, one story at a time.

Do you ever feel like you'd be lost without your phone, or find it hard to put it down? Are you curious to know what it’s like to be a little less dependent on your phone and a little more in charge of how and when you use it? Transcend provides a fun, simple way to help college students take control of their technology use and explore new life experiences. You earn and achieve badges while recording focused time engaged in a range of self-selected activities, challenges, and reflections. Experience a sense of accomplishment by charting your activities and cultivating time management skills. Gain control of your technology use by monitoring your usage hours everyday. Gain personal insight by reflecting on your technology habits. Transcend provides a self-directed method for helping you to shift the balance in your life from app-dependence to app-enablement.

While there are many websites to book flights, cars, and accommodation, not many help in creating an itinerary for vacation. TripTips is a website that minimizes the agony of travelers by getting locals at the destination to plan their trip. As part of the capstone, we are adding a new feature to the website that would allow users to effortlessly plan their travel on a map-based and a calendar-based canvas. It would be designed to be shareable on social media to allow multiple users to collaborate and edit the itinerary. This shareability and the potential virality that can result from it, would make TripTips more familiar to travelers and lead to an increased user base. Through our capstone project, we are making TripTips stand out from the crowd with its unique travel planning feature that would be user-friendly and flexible, and would give users a reason to engage with the company for their travel planning needs.

When friends and family go out to eat, they can have difficulties determining what restaurants that they should go to because everyone can have different tastes and values. Turnip allows you to find good restaurants that have meal choices that fit your diet, even if they don’t specifically cater to you. Without our service, an individual would have to go through every restaurant’s website, find their menu, and parse out the information. Turnip users can search for a food item and filter the results by our four main categories: vegan, vegetarian, dairy-free, and gluten-free. A grid of pictures of restaurants that have food that match their search will show up with their address, contact information, and operating hours. The user can then click on the photos to look at each dish that satisfy their diet.

Personal information management (PIM) is a vital topic in information studies. Traditionally, PIM systems provided folders for information storage and retrieval. Nevertheless, in the era of Web 2.0, it is possible that tags can be widely used in the PIM systems. In recent years, much progress has been made in PIM, but many fail to achieve the goal of making tagging method widely used. Our project – designing and developing a web-based application overcomes the barrier between traditional hierarchical folders structure and tagging system offering a “Universal Tagging” model. This new application gives Internet users more freedom in choosing how to store and retrieve their own personal information items, particularly web references, through a simple, uncomplicated User Interface and efficient matching “Tagging” as folders mechanism. As always, people look forward to a better way to organize, re-find and share their personal information items. And we are innovating.

At UW, commuters have a tough time trying to find parking at campus parking lots & garages and pay for higher parking rates. Drivers get stuck in redirect loops and often have difficulty coordinating carpools. Our solution to this issue is a mobile application called “Parking Hero”. Our application provides commuters with information about which parking lots are full and which aren’t ahead of time so they can head straight to an open lot from the start, saving time and stress. It also allows them to connect with other commuters to coordinate carpooling to get the cheaper carpooling rate. This application will help decrease the congestion of UW parking lots and garages and improve the amount of carpoolers to UW campus.

Splaces is the first, tour-centric UW Android app that allows users to explore 154 years of the university’s rich and gritty history. This project revamps the existing three-part Spaces and Places campus tour, originally created by the UW Office of the University Architect (OUA). Historically, Spaces and Places was limited to being available as an online PDF, phone tree, and placard. Now, with Splaces, all of those are accessible in the palm of your hand. Maps, routes, and points of interest are hosted by the UW Capital Projects Office (CPO). By using their geographic information systems (GIS) we hope to show the potential of having a centralized, sustainable infrastructure for location-based data, and set a precedent for other groups and departments to follow. We would like to give special thanks to our partners at the CPO and OUA for helping make this project possible.

My project makes investing in Exchange-Traded Funds, or ETFs, easier by guiding the investor through an easy-to-follow three step process. Investors, especially ones new to the trading industry, are often overwhelmed at the sheer amount of information that is available to them. I addressed this issue by creating an application that uses simple, questionnaire-style input from the investor to determine their individual needs to create an investment strategy based on current market data. The end result is a straightforward list of ETFs that can be taken to any brokerage firm and immediately traded. By limiting the amount of technical details the investor has to understand, and focusing on a simple, easy-to-follow guide, I give the investor an intuitive and powerful tool for increasing their financial stability.

Hispanic day laborers are experiencing serious difficulties to seek and maintain the jobs. They have uncertain jobs, very low wages, no benefits or health insurance, limited access and use of information technologies. Casa Latina, our sponsor, is a Seattle-based nonprofit service agency serving the Hispanic community. We would explore the needs and expectations of day laborers in Seattle area and address these needs by building a website that enable networking and manage reputation. This website would help day laborers to show their skills and experiences to potential clients through an easy to use, bilingual (English and Spanish) platform. Clients can also get in touch with the day labors they hope to work for them. In order to make the further profile management easier for Casa Latina staff, we built a user-friendly dashboard which allow further edits according to their needs.

In the absence of industry standards, many small- and medium-sized companies struggle to assess the security risks of cloud adoption. Additionally, the quality and intended audience of available resources is typically focused on singular topics, or otherwise not suitable for companies to consume. To address these issues we published a website to serve as a reference for common concerns and a resource collection for various authorities regarding cloud computing security concerns. The website is published alongside a formal document outlining our findings on GitHub to make them open source, allowing their content to be changed and updated as necessary in the future.