Kristin Laufenberg, Consulting & Outreach Librarian
Outagamie Waupaca Library System
Have you ever wondered “How does my library compare to others in Wisconsin? How do we know if our budget, staffing, building size, or program offerings are in line with other libraries?”
- Maybe you’re considering a renovation, a whole new building, a budget revision or wage increase, or just a change in hours.
- Maybe your patrons, other community organizations, municipal leaders, or donors have questions about what your library does and how it is growing.
- Maybe after signing off on the annual report, you’re curious about what that data is used for!
Whether you need hard numbers to support your library’s decision-making or you’re just curious, there are multiple resources available, designed for librarians and trustees at all levels of data literacy. The Wisconsin Public Library Consortium (WPLC) has organized the best of these into their Data Use Toolkit. Start here for a one-stop shop for library data as well as practical resources to understand, analyze and apply data effectively.
This newsletter will highlight two tools in the Toolkit that may be of interest to Wisconsin trustees; they’re also just fun to play around with, especially if you’re a visual person. Once in the WPLC Toolkit, visit the “Dashboards” link and look for the WPLC Data Dashboard and South Central Library System’s Fast Facts Dashboard.
The Fast Facts Dashboard from South Central Library System offers a quicker option for visualizing library annual report information. In the Fast Facts Dashboard, you can select a single library, county, or library system and quickly view a snapshot of service data across multiple dimensions, such as library visits, circulation, program attendance, collection size, and technology usage. It provides a colorful, visual, at-a-glance summary for a given year. Your selected view can be downloaded as an image file or PDF for inclusion in reports or on a website.
Example of the Fast Facts Dashboard:
The WPLC Data Dashboard is the more robust of the two. Based on select data points from all 382 public library annual reports, the Dashboard can display individual library data, data over time or in a given year, and peer comparisons and strategies for benchmarking library data. There is a lot of information in the Data Dashboard and multiple ways to build comparisons, so plan to spend a bit of time familiarizing yourself with your options for data points and how to identify other libraries in your cohort. There is also a video tutorial and training toolkit to help get you started.
Example from the Data Dashboard:
If you’d like to get a live, real-time overview of these two Dashboards from the data professionals who built and maintain them, watch “Make Data Work for Your Library: Getting Started with Wisconsin Public Library Dashboards.” This one-hour webinar walks viewers through both Dashboards and shares examples of how they may be used to answer library board questions, build presentations for the library’s governing body, and inform strategic planning. Finally, your library system staff are a great resource to help you start parsing annual report data, decide which data is most relevant to your questions, and interpret comparisons and outliers.
Data is vital to understanding your library’s current services and planning for the future, and the tools and assistance for using it are at your fingertips. Go out and make data work for your library!
Links and References:
https://dpi.wi.gov/libraries/public-library-dashboards-data-use-toolkit
https://wplc.info/for-libraries/datatoolkit/
https://wplc.info/for-libraries/data-dashboard/
https://www.scls.info/data-services/dashboards/fast-facts
https://vimeo.com/1212711145?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci