As librarians how can we utilize data and what we learn from it to skillfully represent what’s going on in our organizations? On this show Katie Pierce Farrier – Data Science Strategist for the Network of the National Library of Medicine, Region 3 – talks about ways we can use data dashboards to communicate and share findings to best serve constituents.
Transcript
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Adriane Herrick Juarez:
This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. You’re listening to Library Leadership podcast where we talk about libraries and leadership and speak with guests who share their ideas, innovations and strategic insights in the profession. As librarians, how can we utilize data and what we learn from it to skillfully represent what’s going on in our organizations?
On this show, Katie Pierce Farrier—Data Science Strategist for the Network of the National Library of Medicine, Region 3, talks about ways we can use data dashboards to communicate and share findings to best serve constituents. Enjoy the show!
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #1: Katie, welcome to the show. Thank you for talking with me today about building data dashboards. I would like to begin by jumping right in on the idea behind data dashboards and why these are useful in libraries of all types. First, what is a data dashboard and what can it do for us? 01:20
Katie Pierce Farrier:
Well, thank you so much for having me here today. A data dashboard can look like a lot of different things. Mainly it’s a way to group several different visualizations together and build a story. Some are meant to be more stagnant. They might be on a particular moment in time or more of a short term project. The dashboards that I create for our regional office are meant to coalesce information from several different resources. The idea is that we could use all the data that we have, put it in this dashboard so we can see the data in real-time, and it would help us make real-time decisions based on real-time data.
We have a dashboard for our education and trainings. We also have one to review our outreach with member organizations, and the different projects that we collaborate with them on.
The data dashboards, to answer the second part of that question, they’re an excellent tool for us because we have so many different systems that we collect our data from. This gives us a single place to review that information. It makes it easy to share with our administration, with our other coordinators, and with our other stakeholders. It also helps show the big picture. Everyone in our office does a lot of independent work and we each have our own specialties and areas of interest. The dashboards bring it all together and we can see our combined impact.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #2: I imagine it’s helpful in this work to develop this as part of a data-driven culture. Can you explain what that means and ways to get there? 03:00
Katie Pierce Farrier:
Part of the Network of the National Library of Medicine’s strategic plan is to embrace data, to prepare librarians to be data-driven, and to be data literate. We’re working on ways to incorporate that at Region 3. For us, being data-driven means that every single one of our team members understands why we’re collecting this data, what is being used for, and they understand the need and the importance behind it. They know where to find the data and how to use it to make more strategic decisions.
Building that data-driven culture in our office has been very important. We’re a small team. We have a lot of moving parts and we cover a seven-state region. There’s five or six of us and there’s seven states. There’s millions of people that we try to reach. We do a lot of collaborative work with our partners from all across the nation. We really have to be very strategic about what projects we take on and how we prioritize our work. Data helps us do that.
What makes our data-driven culture successful is that we’re constantly communicating it. It’s a constant conversation about, Is this information helpful? Is there information that could help you do your job better? The information just doesn’t go into a black hole, never to be seen again. It’s fed back out to our team members so that they can actually use it. I’m very open about our data processes. I ask for feedback very frequently, and people are more likely to buy into it if they know where the information is going, if they know how it’s being used and they can access it for themselves. That’s a really important part of making that data-driven culture.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #3: Absolutely. And I know you talk about evaluation frameworks, what are these and how are they utilized? 04:41
Katie Pierce Farrier:
Evaluation frameworks—there are some really great ones out there. The ones I tend to use the most is the Spectrum of Public Participation. This provides a scale of how engaged the community is. It’s everything from one-way communications, like social media posts, and email listservs, all the way up to really involving community members in directing and planning projects.
I like it because it highlights the importance of having engagement across all of those spectrums. You need email updates to tell people if your opening hours have changed or if you have a new service that you’re rolling out. But you also need community involvement from those members to pull off making those really relevant, successful programming and offerings that libraries do.
One of the other frameworks that I really like to use is Austin and Green. They focus on measuring community outreach, then they break it down into four simple questions that really help you think through what you want to accomplish, who your stakeholders are, how you define success, how you define failure, and how that will look like for you and your organization. Those are some of the frameworks that I really like to use.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #4: What ways do you recommend libraries communicate and share their data findings? 05:52
Katie Pierce Farrier:
I recommend focusing on being clear, consistent, and concise—especially the consistent part. This looks different for different teams. Our team—we all work remote, so the dashboards are really great because all of our team members can access them, look at them, take a screenshot—what have you. They’re updated at least every two weeks, so all of our team knows that the information is current.
The dashboards display information about our education and training offerings. There’s things like how many attendees we had, survey feedback, if they took CE credit. It’s all collected and recorded in the same consistent way—same file, the same time-frame.
If these dashboards aren’t going to be updated, like if I’m out-of-office, or I need to make a major change to the dashboard, I let the team know. I also like to send out random tidbits as I find them. It might be something unusual or just something interesting I came across.
For example, we recently had a training and we thought this would be of interest to a certain demographic, but as I was gathering the data I noticed that particular demographic didn’t show up as much as we thought they would. So, I shared that out to the team real quick just so we could comment and brainstorm around it. Those updates are more planned, but it helps keep those communication lines open. I really just like to be concise, get to the point of what I’m trying to say, and make sure that they know when those updates are coming out—when they can expect them in that time frame.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #5: Can you please talk about the tools available for this work and what you’ve found to be useful? 07:25
Katie Pierce Farrier:
When we first started talking about making the data dashboards for our office, we decided to try Tableau Public, which is free, and then Power BI, which we had a subscription through our university. There’s a lot of other tools out there that you can use, but we didn’t have to pay to access these, so that’s what we decided to use and test out.
Both Power BI and Tableau have a learning curve to them, but there’s numerous resources, videos, training, data sets that you can use to get familiar with them. And there’s plenty of support out there to help you learn. Overall, they’re pretty similar tools. They have the same basic functions. They build visualizations. They build dashboards. The hard part with both of these tools is really just setting them up. But once they’re set up, it’s much quicker just to continually update that information and feed it into the dashboards.
I personally really do enjoy working with Tableau. I think it’s a little bit more user-friendly— changing colors, labels, the small details. It’s a little bit easier in Tableau Public. It’s also better at mapping. It’s based off of Google Maps. So if you’re doing anything with zip codes, I’d recommend Tableau Public, but there’s even more features that you can use with the paid version. Whereas Power BI, again, it does a lot of the same things as Tableau, but there are more analysis features. You can make small formatting changes to your data, so it’s a bit easier to update your data, add new data to Power BI than it is with Tableau.
Power BI is based off of Bing Maps, which doesn’t do as well with zip codes unless you have the exact latitude and longitude, but it is a Microsoft product. You can embed it directly into Teams. So ultimately we went with Power BI because of that. Again, we’re a remote team, so having those dashboards right there where all of our folders, all of our chat communications are, it just made sense. Both Power BI and Tableau are really great tools and ultimately just comes down to personal preference for what you use.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #6: Thank you for sharing those. What are the results of engaging in this work and how can it help our organizations? 09:26
Katie Pierce Farrier:
The purpose of data is to help you make better decisions and communicate your efforts, that’s what data dashboards have helped us do. In order to feed information into the dashboards everything has to be very organized, very streamlined, so we can pick out bits of information very quickly. If you want to know how many points of contact we have in Kansas City, I can tell you that very quickly. If you want to know how many people took our class in April of 2023, I can tell you that. It makes our reporting much more efficient. We know what our most popular classes are, what topics they’re under, as well as our least popular classes, which is good information to have as well.
So again, we have a seven-state region. We have a very large, very diverse population that we serve. And knowing that information really helps us better address regional needs and interests and keep an eye on ongoing trends or topics that are coming up that are of more interest. This information just really helps us prioritize and focus on those projects and what will have the most impact.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #7: Is there anything else you’d like to share? 10:32
Katie Pierce Farrier:
I hope people don’t get intimidated by data, and there’s so many tools out there to help you learn. There’s a lot that are really beginner-friendly. Even a little bit of data collection, even a little bit of that communication can make worlds of difference. I’d really encourage people to, hopefully, not feel intimidated by this—to get in there, start learning. Data science and data literacy is such a huge topic. Don’t feel like you have to be an expert in all of that, especially with libraries, especially of librarians. We’re all out here learning with you, so jump in as much as you can with it.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #8: I’m glad you said that because I think it is easy to get intimidated. Just having that reminder helps. Do you have any favorite management or leadership books or resources and why? 11:09
Katie Pierce Farrier:
This wasn’t necessarily a management or leadership book, but it’s a really great resource out there—it’s called Storytelling with Data, and it’s a really excellent read. This really helped me understand how to better convey information through visualizations. Less is often more with visualizations. You don’t want to overwhelm people with information. This book really instructs you on how to pick out the most important pieces and build a story around that, and engage people with the visualizations that you’re making. So, Storytelling with Data is a book I’d recommend.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #9: Katie In closing, what do libraries mean to you personally? 11:52
Katie Pierce Farrier:
So, this is a hard one. To me, libraries are a haven. They’re a safe space, whether you’re young or old, into art, science, literature, anything that you’re interested in—there’s something for everybody at a library. So, to me, they’re really a place where you can go and explore, and you can learn, and you can do that in a safe space, in a safe environment. That’s what I really love about libraries.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
Question #10: Thank you, Katie. This conversation has helped illustrate how important data can be to all our organizations. We collect it. We reflect on it. We utilize it to make decisions, and we talk to our stakeholders about it. And yet, if we don’t have a way to organize it and represent it, it can be under-utilized, leaving our organizations unprepared to act as part of a data-driven culture. So, I appreciate you for sharing all of this with us and for being on the show. 12:17
Katie Pierce Farrier:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be able to talk about this today.
Adriane Herrick Juarez:
You’ve been listening to Library Leadership podcast. This is Adriane Herrick Juarez. For more episodes, tune in to Library Leadership Podcast.com, where you can now subscribe to get episodes delivered right into your email inbox. Our producer is Nathan Sinclair Vineyard. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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