Digital Media Commons Administration System

When was the last time you dealt with a paper-based record system? If it's been a while, that tracks, but they're still alive and well in the depths of Fondren Library, inside Rice's Digital Media Commons. Every equipment checkout ran through one of 60 paper forms: a staff member reading someone's handwriting, retyping it later, and filing the sheet away by hand. Slow at the desk, and impossible to search once it was filed.

I worked on this as part of RiceApps Launchpad, a program that teaches new developers the fundamentals of web development by having them build something real for one of Rice's own problems. For the 2025 to 2026 cohort, our team took on the DMC's paper checkout system.

My focus was the checkout forms themselves. I made sure each one populated with the right fields, validated what a student typed in before it ever reached the database, and stored the finished submission in our backend cleanly enough that staff could pull it back up later instead of digging through a filing cabinet.

None of this happens solo. I got to build it alongside an amazing group of teammates, and it wouldn't have come together without our team lead keeping us on track from our first wireframe to the final presentation.