A Capstone Experience: NULS Multimedia Request Automation

Libraries at universities support their faculty, students and staff in their academic and research endeavors by providing easy access to a vast collection of printed and multimedia materials. The university library uses, in general, a library management system (LMS) that provides easy access to a countless array of resources both onsite as well as online users. At our university the library staff, in addition to standard library resources, also maintains a large collection of multimedia equipment and provides related services to library users. The multimedia services include recording of lectures, interviews, events, etc. under different settings as well as use of equipment and human resources. In current setup a request can be submitted, processed and managed manually by the library staff, whereas users demand a faster and a more efficient way of submitting multimedia requests as it would produce faster turnaround times for scheduled projects. Therefore, a group of students was assigned the task, as their capstone project, to evaluate, develop and deploy an automated system to handle the flood of multimedia requests being received by library staff. In this paper we report a capstone experience gained by undergraduate students. The students were required to design and implement a web based system for not only handling the requisitions for multimedia equipment and/or services but also the entire approval process until the multimedia project is complete. This paper reports the experience students had and shows utilization of the knowledge that they gained from programming, Human Computer Interaction, System Analysis and Design and other similar courses during their program.