Bayou Playhouse, a small theater located in Lockport, Louisiana, holds a collection of costumes and props. However, there was no system in place to keep track of the current collection or any newly obtained items. This is an issue when putting together productions, as the organization often either wastes time looking for an item that may not be there or wastes money repurchasing an item that was already in the collection. To solve this problem, I designed a Microsoft Access database to create an inventory system. In the coming months, I will finish cataloging every item to complete the database.

Behance is a social media platform owned by Adobe that allows artists to develop and share their artwork with other users. With more than 10 million users searching for inspiration, personalized recommendations play a pivotal role in the overall UX. The current recommendation algorithm at Behance requires substantial user activity to generate recommendations and surfaces artwork with higher likes more often. To make these recommendations more fine-tuned, we developed an algorithm using Cypher, that analyzes the activity of all related users & provides weight to project themes instead of likes. Our algorithm also reduced the recommendation generation time by 50%.

Our project is helping the Idaho Commission for Libraries (ICFL) modernize their existing free training resource: Alternative Basic Library Education (ABLE). While a successful program, it needs significant revision, consolidation, and updating to continue being a relevant LIS resource. We are supplying ICFL with the following documents to aid them: comprehensive content audit, user personas, and taxonomy terms/concepts to guide future content creation. The goal is to help ICFL continue providing free quality, versatile LIS resources while increasing the reach of the program to the underserved and the underrepresented in the field of library and information sciences.

Adequate and equitable library spaces and services are not available to every student attending Seattle Public Schools. Stakeholders with different priorities have resulted in SPS libraries that are chronically understaffed and underfunded. Seattle’s citizens signaled strong library support through the recent allocation of $219 million to Seattle Public Library (SPL), the city’s primary library system. This Capstone advocates for a comprehensive public-public partnership between SPL and SPS libraries to scaffold the tremendous work of Seattle's school librarians while bringing all of the assets of SPL’s world-class library system into every one of the city’s public school communities.

Bird the Gap is an outreach-oriented web mapping project to direct birdwatchers to locations currently underrepresented in crowdsourced data compiled by eBird and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. My multi-layered interactive web map uses two sets of raster data from eBird’s statistical models to identify geographic gaps in worldwide data from 2018. Using open-source software programs RStudio and QGIS, I prepared data for all 52 weeks. The scalable prototype uses Mapbox and its JavaScript library to visualize data from one week in July. Bird the Gap will assist in eBird’s ongoing mapping projects, which support scientific research and conservation efforts.

Currently entrepreneurs in the maritime industry are facing the problem of finding funding opportunities efficiently with disparate messy online resources with high charges. Our Blue Funder Portal provides one central location for maritime innovators to find and search for a wide range of funding opportunities sponsored by the Washington State Department of Commerce. These entrepreneurial projects flourish and further help to grow the “blue” business in the pacific northwest maritime industry.

Blyp is a digital curation tool intended for those at end-of-life. People death plan in various ways--from cleaning social media profiles, to leaving predated emails for loved ones. Existing social media platforms focus on what is happening now, but not much on what happens after we pass. With Blyp, users can preserve memories through photo and text media, specify a location, and decide when loved ones can access their blyps. Blyp gives those close-to-death a platform to leave stories behind, while at the same time creating conversation around and de-stigmatizing death. Blyp is available as an iOS mobile application.

Imagine yourself suspended ten feet in the air, fingers losing grip, and bracing for your inevitable fall, all because you can’t tell the difference between two rocks. At rock climbing gyms, boulders are color-coded to represent the level of difficulty which is a disadvantage for colorblind individuals. Our team saw a need to help this user group participate in this sport with relative ease. Bold Colors is a free mobile web application that uses object recognition and color detection to help users autonomously see their routes before they scale the wall.

Books for Littles (BFL) is an online resource helping parents and educators engage kids with hard topics and social justice using children’s books. My wonderful sponsor, Ashia Ray, launched BFL in 2014. Today, the organization is flourishing, but has become burdensome for one person to manage. I worked with Ashia on a system to enhance collaborative efforts and reduce their individual workload, developing an efficient process for volunteer recruitment and support, a centralized resource describing specific tasks, and detailed documentation for complex tasks. I also researched grant funding to potentially cover future operational costs. Raising Luminaries logo used by permission.

For this capstone project I partnered with the Breman Museum, a Jewish heritage museum in Atlanta, GA, that is working to broaden their visibility by creating exhibits for the Atlanta roll out of the Google Arts and Culture project. I created two archival exhibits, focused on Jewish human rights advocates, described and uploaded a hundred artifacts to the online collection, and wrote an exhibit creation guide for staff and volunteers. This project brings to light Southern Jewish voices, humanizes the Jewish experience, and stimulates awareness of the collections held by the Breman Museum.