Sidney Huntington School in Galena, Alaska has a thin collection of Graphic Novels and Manga. A majority of high school students read below grade level making it essential to explore how graphic novels could aid in literacy development and increase lifelong readers. I surveyed students regarding their interests, researched how graphic novels impacted literacy, found the best resources in determining the quality of graphic novels, created a policy for future collection development, and built a Must-Have list. SHS will acquire these titles to provide resources for classroom use, choices for reluctant readers, options for current fans, and offer new experiences.

The Grand Challenges Program is a global initiative to solve health and development problems for those most in need. It has been responsible for over 2800 grants in over 100 countries. One of the program’s largest funders, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been dispersing grants and collecting data throughout the years, but this data currently exists across many disparate sources, in various formats residing on different platforms. This data warehouse was created to synthesize all the data into a single stream that can be easily queried and analyzed to identify true success metrics.

IHME administrators have been manually managing a network of over 3,400+ collaborators across the globe. Our newly designed portal integrated with Salesforce will provide IHME collaborators with the capability to view and edit personal information at their convenience. This will significantly reduce the current workload for the IHME network admins, allowing them to allocate resources for more important tasks, as well as, all the network to scale as more collaborators join. Also provided are interactive visualizations of the collaborators’ data to provide a deeper insight of the collaborators’ distribution throughout the world.

The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) recently implemented their first digital asset management (DAM) solution. They originally sought to implement a system that would improve the administration of their digital media across all departments. Our work realized the limitations of the purchased software as well as the DAM’s unidentified scope and purpose which would not support the various use cases across the institution’s departments. This presented an opportunity to take the lessons learned and evolve them into a cohesive assessment. We further developed our recommendations into an iterative model that integrates SAM’s needs and organizational culture for their future DAM success.

The West Coast has seen an increase in poor air quality due to wildfires. Witnessing first-hand the impact that smoke had on the Spokane community, I partnered with the Spokane Public Library to identify what the library could do to prepare for these events in the future. The result of this research and exploration is an ideas and resources guide that public libraries can use to help propel the conversation on how to help communities during episodes of poor air quality.

Social media is addictive. Social media has the power to connect people all over the world. However, Studies have shown that social media impacts people’s lives negatively. Our project focused on creating a new social media platform that’s purpose is to prove that social media can be effective, meaningful, and impact mental health positively. Our platform on the idea of only being to use it for one minute a day, believing that by cutting down the viewing time, we can decrease addiction while also motivating users to post interesting content.

Home Care Aides are the future of long-term care in the USA, allowing older adults and people with disabilities to live in the community and age in place. Unfortunately, a significant portion of the HCA workforce suffers from high rates of chronic diseases. Our team has partnered with SEIU 775 Benefits Group to understand and communicate the prevalence of chronic diseases in the HCA workforce through statistical analysis and evaluation. By utilizing medical insurance claims data, our team has generated an interactive report that provides information on a vulnerable group of healthcare providers in order to support a healthy workforce.

My aim for my Capstone was to make some of the previously unavailable historical visual materials housed in UW's Special Collections accessible for researchers by providing organized, digitized, and searchable collections. To do this, I identified photograph subject matter, researched historical context and significance, inventoried collections, determined appropriate organizational schemes, created indexes, digitizing prints and negatives, preserved materials by moving them to appropriate archival housing, created finding aids using the XMetaL Author program, and linked XML entries to corresponding digital scans. By the project's end I had completed two collections, and determined organizational systems and background information for two more.

We reimagined how a dollar can generate data. The Food Access Partnership on Vashon Island distributes cash to the community to minimize costs of locally grown food, but the paper currency they create and distribute suffers from low redemption rates. Improving this system, our solution provides real time data for partnering nonprofits and farmers while preserving the familiar paper “Farm Buck.” Now, our stakeholders can track Farm Bucks through the system and encourage users to redeem them at farmer’s markets and farm stands. Placing data in the hands of organizers, we’re helping Vashon Islanders address food equity in their community.