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Abstract: Public Library Data for Public Library Stories
From preparing children for kindergarten to providing community gardens to providing technology, public libraries do a lot of good for their communities. From the outside, though, it can be hard to understand the work that public libraries are doing and what potential those changes bring to communities, and it can be hard to understand why an intervention that succeeds in one community fails in another. In this paper, we discuss a project to bring together multiple sets of data to help public libraries tell their stories to external audiences, and how the project contributes to the scholarship of public libraries in the United States.
Why is telling the public library story so hard? As noted by Measures that Matter, an IMLS-funded initiative, “there is no overarching national plan for the collection, storage, use, and dissemination of public library data and service outcomes” (Smith et al., 2017). On the national level, public library data is largely limited to the Public Library Survey (PLS), an annual product of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). While this covers inputs and outputs, data on outcomes and outreach at the national level are lacking. The Public Library Association’s Project Outcome attempts to collect outcome data, but participation is voluntary and tied to program assessment. The Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services (ABOS) has just begun collecting data on public library outreach efforts. State libraries often collect unique information specific to their state, but that information is not centralized. In short, there is a lot of public library data, but the data is not centralized nor easily accessible.
Telling stories about libraries using data is also difficult because program outcomes are sometimes hard to measure. Despite logic models that predict program outcomes, the fact is that public library communities are made up of individuals at different places in life. Easily measurable changes in knowledge, for example, often fail to impact a person until many years later. Libraries can follow-up with patrons to measure programming outcomes over time, but this generally requires substantial resources and retaining personally identifiable information.
Our project brings together multiple data sources to link library and community data to sidestep many of the issues noted above. We link library inputs and outputs (PLS), outcomes (Project Outcome), outreach (ABOS), and community demographic (ACS) data. The final, combined data set will be a snapshot in time, using ACS five-year estimate data from 2018-2023, Project Outcome data collected from 2015-2023, and Bookmobile Outreach and Repository Information collected in 2023. While working with these data sets, we have had to address issues of data security and accuracy to make the data usable and useful to academic researchers. This curated data set will be finalized by July 2024. We will discuss research possibilities afforded by the data set and how to access the data set.
Why is telling the public library story so hard? As noted by Measures that Matter, an IMLS-funded initiative, “there is no overarching national plan for the collection, storage, use, and dissemination of public library data and service outcomes” (Smith et al., 2017). On the national level, public library data is largely limited to the Public Library Survey (PLS), an annual product of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). While this covers inputs and outputs, data on outcomes and outreach at the national level are lacking. The Public Library Association’s Project Outcome attempts to collect outcome data, but participation is voluntary and tied to program assessment. The Association of Bookmobile and Outreach Services (ABOS) has just begun collecting data on public library outreach efforts. State libraries often collect unique information specific to their state, but that information is not centralized. In short, there is a lot of public library data, but the data is not centralized nor easily accessible.
Telling stories about libraries using data is also difficult because program outcomes are sometimes hard to measure. Despite logic models that predict program outcomes, the fact is that public library communities are made up of individuals at different places in life. Easily measurable changes in knowledge, for example, often fail to impact a person until many years later. Libraries can follow-up with patrons to measure programming outcomes over time, but this generally requires substantial resources and retaining personally identifiable information.
Our project brings together multiple data sources to link library and community data to sidestep many of the issues noted above. We link library inputs and outputs (PLS), outcomes (Project Outcome), outreach (ABOS), and community demographic (ACS) data. The final, combined data set will be a snapshot in time, using ACS five-year estimate data from 2018-2023, Project Outcome data collected from 2015-2023, and Bookmobile Outreach and Repository Information collected in 2023. While working with these data sets, we have had to address issues of data security and accuracy to make the data usable and useful to academic researchers. This curated data set will be finalized by July 2024. We will discuss research possibilities afforded by the data set and how to access the data set.