We collaborated with the Pilchuck Glass School to survey, assess and curate a collection of their library resources to be properly preserved, described and made accessible for research. These resources include an archive of DVDs that consist of artist demonstrations dating back to the early 1980’s and ephemeral items such as museum catalogues from all over the world. We delivered a detailed strategy plan for the preservation of these items, including a collection development policy to guide the future development of the library. Our hope is that with this foundation in place Pilchuck will be able to apply for grant funding to continue the preservation process.

In 2013, Western Washington University’s Office of University Residences began creating a departmental intranet. As of December 2015, though the intranet was up and running, staff were not confident working within it. Administrators worried that a lack of training would lead to a disorganized intranet. My Capstone sought to build staff enthusiasm and confidence around the intranet, giving them the skills to add content in ways that ensure easy access to well-organized content. I collected staff feedback, which I used to develop and implement two in-person intranet trainings. Trainings focused on skill acquisition as well as active discussion about the intranet. I also created supporting documentation and recommendations for the future. Staff evaluations of these trainings were encouraging, and this in-person training will be incorporated in new employee orientations. This Capstone helped to build energy and discussion around the intranet, and will assist with its long-term success.

The fitness industry is currently worth $27 billion, and has grown less than 2% over the last 5 years. Gyms have abysmal retention rates ranging from 40-70%, and spend nearly 9 times as much in acquisition costs. At the same time, more than 200 million Americans today are considered overweight. How is a growing problem not matched by an industry specifically designed to solve it? Because people fall into the TRIBE – Time, Results, Interest, Body Image and Energy, the top five excuses for not working out. Gymfluence uses habit-centered design techniques to help people mitigate the TRIBE. We analyze user behavior, anticipate excuses, inform gym staff and enable the staff to influence users through data and a positive reward cycle. Additionally, we help users document their commitment to their personal wellbeing. And the kicker? Half our app can only be opened inside the gym!

The Kearsarge Seed Savers Group is a small group of farmers and gardeners in rural New Hampshire with an interest in preserving open pollinated seeds that are either rare or of local interest. Due to competition with hybrid varieties more suitable to long distance transport and disease resistance, more than 90% of the United States fruit and vegetable varieties have vanished. This group’s mission is to preserve heirloom varieties whilst also creating a Darwinian effect that increases production by saving seeds from the best plant and utilizing each generation. Although dedicated to the conservation of often long forgotten varieties, the group has struggled with organization and communication. The solution presented was the development of an Access database to serve as a dynamic catalog for the seed collection that monitors inventory levels for storage and distribution. This is connected to a website for means of communication via xml.

The Interventional Radiology department at Seattle Children's Hospital currently deals with an inefficient, error prone system to manually transcribe patient appointments from the billing system to a calendar accessible to nurses, Radiology technologists, and doctors in the operating room. We set out to determine how we can improve the scheduling process for interventional radiology procedures at Seattle Children’s Hospital so that staff are able to easily view upcoming procedures within the context of the patient’s protected health information. We designed a scheduling system to fit the needs of clinicians and staff at Seattle Children's Hospital. The application, called Hippo, is built to contain information accessible with a glance, while maintaining customizability to adapt to the hospital's changing needs. Hippo also connects with existing medical applications, such as Epic and Cerner, to automatically import new appointments and reduce transcription errors. Hippo is a browser based application designed to be accessible on desktop, mobile, and large screen devices.

Caldera is an Oregon-based nonprofit that provides mentoring to students through arts and environmental programming. Its staff works with youth year-round for seven years, starting in middle school and continuing through high school graduation. The White House recently recognized Caldera as one of only twelve nonprofits to receive the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program (NAHYP) Award. As the organization celebrates its 20-year anniversary, its stakeholders have become critically aware of the need for an organized, centralized digital image repository to serve as an archive of organizational history and enable discovery to promote future work. Currently, its digital images exist across upwards of ten poorly organized hard drives. For my Capstone project, I have assessed Caldera’s collection and available technology and developed a long-term project plan for establishing a repository. This plan includes recommendations on ingest, preservation, and discovery.

The future of the country lies in the hands of the children. If the child doesn’t get the right start, he is 60% more likely to never go to college and 70% more likely to be arrested for a violent crime. However, good quality of early learning education can change these statistics. The Childcare Quality & Early Learning Center for Research and Professional Development (CQEL) is the University of Washington’s effort to measure and improve the quality of early learning environments for children. CQEL is responsible for conducting, onsite evaluations of child care providers located throughout the state. The process of rating early education sites was being executed using a complex and cumbersome Excel spreadsheet until Data Wanderers pitched in. The team transformed the IRC Database solution from Excel to a robust SQL relational database thereby catering the problem of data security, data losses, multi-user access and facilitates standard and adhoc reports to analyze the performance of various sites.

The Bancroft Library on the University of California, Berkeley campus is one of the most heavily used repositories of Western Americana in the United States. Our project makes thousands of manuscript items and printed materials relating to Indigenous communities of present-day California more approachable, searchable, and accessible. With assistance and feedback from members of Indigenous communities in California and subject specialists, we have created a cohesive, detailed guide listing individual titles of items with links to their related collections, catalog records, and finding aids. Our records are organized by language family, and again by four categories we created: Lifeways (physical culture), Worldview (relationships, geographic location, and activism), Mythology & Storytelling (narrative representations), Language (linguistic materials), and General (all material not appropriate for other groupings). We hope our project assists in the preservation and revitalization of traditional culture and language through increased knowledge, respect and understanding of our California communities.

The Museum of Flight receives a huge amount of research requests from its patrons/customers. The requests are collected through paper forms, stored in editable PDF’s and processed in Excel for reference and tracking purposes. Due to inefficient processing and primitive technology, the resource usage is high and redundant. They strive for a robust information management system which is intuitive to use, can be accessed from multiple locations and stores data centrally. The Data Flight capstone team assessed the requirements and designed a database management system for the museum of flight. The new system is built on cutting edge technology, incorporating important features like central storage, multiple session access to update data in real time, and multivariable reporting. As a prospective patron/customer of the museum, your requests will be processed much faster. The solutions takes paper forms out of the equation and contributes towards a clean and greener environment.

Starbucks’ information security team is continually seeking to understand which of its security events to prioritize for response. Although the organization utilizes a security information and event management tool for detecting anomalous activity, the number of alerts being generated by the tool are overwhelming and difficult to manage. This is an issue that security teams at many large organizations face; how do you sift through the noise and find the events that are most likely indicative of a security threat or breach? IntelligentIR helps answer this question through the use of machine learning techniques. Using unsupervised learning to label raw security data along with supervised learning to build decision models, intellingentIR identifies and prioritizes new security alerts in order to make incident response more manageable.