Purpose:
What's going on in your library? Does everyone know how you're doing, metrics-wise? My paper will discuss the benefits of creating interactive dashboards to inform library staff on the current state of your library’s ongoing assessment measures and engage library users on the value of the library. By translating static numbers into dynamic visualizations and tailoring the information to your audience, you can tell stories with data to anyone with a stake in your library.
While some libraries have taken the steps to craft a comprehensive assessment overview of library value, as well as areas where improvements can be identified, the integration of these plans into the culture of the department can be difficult. Often, only one or, at most, a handful of librarians and staff are aware of assessment projects and their role across the library. Additionally, mechanisms to report this information out to library users are often underused and inadequate to the task of communicating library value in ways that our patrons find meaningful.
“Data has to be presented in a way that is relate-able; it has to be humanized.” (Yau, in Davis, 2009)
This paper will demonstrate how a dashboard or data story, created with data visualization software available for free on the web, can make the assessment plan, projects and results visible to everyone. By creating dashboards with specific audiences in mind, your library’s data can be “humanized” and fulfil its potential for engagement and positive change.
Design, methodology or approach:
Practical in orientation and rooted in the available literature on data visualization, this paper will use examples to illustrate the various types of visualizations and dashboards that can make library data come alive. Success stories from experience will be shared as well as pitfalls encountered. The focus of the paper will be tailoring visualizations to data, and dashboards to intended audiences, with the guiding purposes of better decision-making, more impactful improvements and closer relationships to stakeholders.
Findings:
As Hilary Davis pointed out in her 2009 paper, “Not Just Another Pretty Picture,” "Good data visualization can drive home a point quickly and have lingering impact. Data visualizations can help you see something that you hadn’t noticed before." Whether this means showing your acquisitions team at a glance where you are with budget spending, demonstrating to administration the overwhelming pressure on your student-booked study rooms or bringing to life for your patrons their patterns of use in your spaces, data visualizations and dashboards have diverse potential applications.
While previous barriers to creating professional-looking visualizations and dashboards seemed insurmountable for all but the largest institutions, recent developments have made the necessary tools available and usable. With only a nascent understanding of data and visualization good practices, library professionals can begin to create impactful visualizations. With creativity and insight, these visualizations can become dashboards, stories and communications vehicles to interact with staff, administration and users. The expected outcome is higher staff and user engagement, as well as increased efficacy of assessment activity.
Research or practical limitations or implications:
I am still in the early phases of introducing dashboards and data storytelling to myself and my library. In the six months between this proposal and the conference, I will be gathering more first-hand evidence and practical experience to augment my literature reviews and initial forays into this field.
Conclusions:
Data is increasingly driving library operations and decision-making. However, data alone does not make improvements or communicate value – it takes human interaction with data to do this. By incorporating visualizations, dashboards and storytelling, and tailoring them to specific audiences, we can allow data to fulfil its potential power by revealing underlying truths and giving us the ability to create a better, more valued library.
Originality and value:
While data visualization has been a topic of interest at conferences and in the literature for a little while now, there seems to be little support to take interested library professionals beyond one-off data visualizations and into the realm of dashboards and audience-targeted storytelling. This paper will attempt to build on current literature and my experience introducing these concepts into my own library over the past couple of years. While I have not conducted a survey of institutions, my discussions with other librarians have led me to the conclusion that very few libraries are creating dashboards to help their staff keep abreast of assessment goals and fewer are engaging their patrons in this manner. Given the advancements in usability of data visualization software, this would seem to derive from a combination of lack of awareness and inertia. This paper strives to overcome both of these factors to empower library professionals to make their data come alive.
References:
Davis, H. (2009). Not Just Another Pretty Picture. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. Retrieved from http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2009/not-just-another-pretty-picture/.
Culture , Impact , Analytics , Innovative Methods , Data
Storytelling_by_the_Numbers_Tania_Alekson.pdf 