iSchool Capstone

2015

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A Fistful of Floppies: Digital Preservation in Action

The University of Washington Library system currently holds a small collection of electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) accompanying materials from the late 1980’s to 2011 on floppy disks and CD-Rs. These materials will soon reach or have already exceeded the limit of their expected lifespans. This project looked at the digital preservation possibilities for this collection of materials using digital forensics as a model. Working with Preservation Services staff, a workflow using industry standard best practices and open source software was developed and implemented. Each item in the collection was forensically imaged, analyzed, documented and packaged for eventual preservation in the Universities’ online repository. A full inventory of remaining thesis materials on physical media in the library collection was also created and a digital preservation computer station with the BitCurator forensic environment was installed in Preservation Services for future projects.
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Achilles

The $30 billion physical therapy (PT) industry is projected to grow 7% annually (HarrisWilliams&Co.). Despite this growth, current PT practices often leverage low-tech guidance, involve minimal patient-therapist communication, and do not provide a means for accountability. The PT industry is on the rise, and it’s time for PT technology to catch up. So, how do we help physical therapists serve their patients while guiding and motivating patients to get better faster? The answer is Achilles, a fully customizable physical therapy application that amplifies the patient-therapist relationship to provide guidance and motivation throughout the rehabilitation process. The therapist interface provides consistent insights into patients’ at-home progress as provided by the patient interface, effectively bridging the gap between office visits. Achilles augments the physical therapy experience and in turn, patients are able to better manage their injuries and get better faster.
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Adapt

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.
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Advertising Budget Recommendation Model

94% of consumers research cars online before purchasing, and about a third willing to buy a car online. CDK Global’ s digital advertising department makes online marketing easy for vehicle dealers by budgeting and handling digital advertisement to increase customer reach and sales. We have focused on improving their budgeting process with an efficient and accurate model that improves transparency and customer satisfaction. We used predictive analysis to develop a model using Google AdWords, market demand and vehicle sales data for a particular Marketing Area to give a sophisticated budget proposal. This model will give insight into the top selling car models for a dealer and the amount of dollars the dealer needs to spend to advertise those models. The Advertising Analysts will be able to use this model to derive detailed performance of a client in a quicker and precise fashion, increasing the overall efficiency of the budgeting process.
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America and the Race to the Moon

Using images, moving pictures, documents, and narrative stories, our team has created an engaging digital exhibition in Omeka, an online digital collections management system, for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This project explores the history of the Space Race between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) from the launch of Sputnik I in 1957 through the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969. Team members addressed copyright issues, gained permissions as needed, and developed metadata according to Dublin Core standards. Since the DPLA is an aggregation of digital objects from partnering institutions all over the country, our project aimed to curate digital objects exemplifying a theme of national importance. In doing so, we hope to engage an audience of scholars, students, and all those who may wish to learn more about this evocative period in time.
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Arctic Data Explorer

The data captured in historic ships' logbooks represent one of the world's deepest untapped reservoirs of meteorological, historical, and environmental information. Logbooks from nineteenth-century Arctic exploring vessels, with their meticulous recordings of weather, sea ice extent, and species range, can support climate reanalysis models and provide a biogeographic and historical atlas of the Arctic past. Since 2012, citizen scientists at Old Weather (oldweather.org) have transcribed more than 100,000 scanned logbook pages from historic Arctic ships. In order to make this data discoverable and accessible, we built and populated an information structure for Old Weather's data—weather observations, ship positions, daily narratives, and associated manuscripts—and designed a pilot interface for exploration and display. For the first time, both researchers and the public have access to logbook scans, data, transcriptions, links to related materials, and full documentation of sources.
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Artifacts of Loss: Memorial Artists’ Books

The Book Arts Collection at the UW Libraries Special Collections includes modern artists’ books as well as works on bookbinding, typography, and other historical printing topics. As a non-circulating library, Special Collections must rely on tools such as exhibits to show users the depth and range of their materials. "Artifacts of Loss" is a unique exhibit installed to highlight a selection of meaningful and evocative artists’ books. In addition to the exhibit itself, tangible results of the project include an exhibit catalog, and a comprehensive list of considered works, which will be used by the collection’s curator and catalogers to improve thematic subject headings. The exhibit allows greater visibility of the Book Arts Collection to prospective users. Beyond that, it addresses a universal, yet deeply personal, aspect of life. The feedback we have received has illustrated the incredible impact this exhibit has had on viewers.
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At the Right Time: Materials for Children Experiencing Divorce

Divorce, for children, can have strong emotional and behavioral repercussions, and can cause lasting mental health issues. Therapists work diligently to help families through this, but aren't experts in publishing. This can lead to a reliance on dated materials that may lack depth, currency and accessibility. Armed with an understanding of some of the issues that divorce causes children, Megan and Chelsea worked with therapist Carol Mapp to create an annotated bibliography of high-quality, accessible titles. It addresses issues beyond divorce, including anxiety, grief, moving to a new home and academics. The structure was designed to enhance usability, and is broken down by issue and age range. This project creates a clear, concise resource of supportive texts that can be browsed or searched with ease. This list can be used to guide decisions on materials used in specific bibliotherapy sessions, as a collection development tool, and even shared with clients.
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Attracting Millennial Shoppers

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.
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Beyond BiblioTEC: Creating a Sustainable Pop-up Makerspace Toolkit for Public Libraries

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.