Finding funding to support the library is a constant challenge. A powerful, free, new tool from the Foundation Center can help your library connect with grants, partners, and potential funders. It’s a great place to start turning data into dollars for your next big idea.
Libraries have a lot of uses for big data. It can reveal useful information for librarians, archivists, researchers, publishers, and authors. What does this set of mobile analytics data tell us about users and their behavior?
Library staff are constantly looking for ways to better reach and serve their local communities. From post-event surveys to embedded librarianship to collecting circulation statistics, libraries have different strategies for gathering information and measuring service success. Market segmentation and big data, two terms popular in the corporate world, can also help libraries make informed decisions about collections and services.
Data science isn’t a common term. So let’s start with an increasingly popular term: big data. Big data earned buzz word status with employers several years ago, and numerous vendors are now talking about big data in libraries. Big data generally refers to the storage and management of large data sets. In this field, it would not be uncommon to work with a sizable datasets of five terabytes or larger. By comparison, five terabytes would hold approximately one million music tracks (85,000 hours of music).
Scholastic has published the fifth edition of its popular Kids & Family Reading Report, the results of a survey conducted in conjunction with YouGov that gauges how children and their parents view reading in their daily lives.[1] The organizations polled over 2,500 respondents, representing ages 0-17, in late 2014. Questions ranged from the importance and frequency of reading for pleasure, what makes a “frequent” reader, where kids are reading, and what kids are looking for when selecting books.
I wrote a few months ago about the data skills that future academic librarians can develop—but what would a data librarian look like in a public library? In this post, I’d like to review a few data concepts, outline potential differences between academic and public librarians, and suggest ways that public librarians could bring data to their patrons.
Big data is everywhere and patrons are increasingly turning to libraries to learn not only what it is, but how it can help their businesses. And just as businesses use big data to target their customers and generate more sales, the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) saw an opportunity to better determine how to best deliver relevant content to its users by implementing big data. Their experience is one that could well help other public libraries leverage all their data to best serve patron needs.
With news breaking every month or so about a company that has had a serious data breach, is your library prepared to protect your information and library network?
Measuring outputs to evaluate library success is only one way of demonstrating effectiveness. To tell the story of how your library changes lives, look to outcome-based measurement.
A recent media scandal involved compromising celebrity photos allegedly hacked from the cloud via the celeb’s cell phones and then distributed to the general public. Shortly after this story broke, my local weather included rain. The jokes flew: every cloud eventually leaks a little.
The Digital Inclusion Survey, which collected information from September to November 2013 about public libraries, is a significant way to see how libraries are excelling and where they are falling short in digital literacy, programming, and technology training.
See how your library compares with the national trends. The FY 2011 survey shows correlations between data elements like library usage, collection size, and funding.
At a recent user’s group conference, there was a dominant theme: the importance of querying and retrieving data. As we know, library-as-place is important. Library-as-place-with-only-books is becoming less important and is an outdated model. This is not a new concept, but it was obvious, at least at this convention center, that library staff are interested in more than books. Several conference sessions were not talking about how to best display or circulate books, but rather about libraries actively removing collections to make space for people to do things. Their materials are still available and findable in the ILS, and the patron will get what they request. But it’s not important where that material is housed (online or in a storage facility).
This report presents selected metrics for FY2012 PLDS data and previous year results in tables and figures with related observations. The results in this report were compiled using PLAmetrics.
Following the German BIX, recently “Library Journal” and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) Metropolitan Libraries Section each published their rankings of public library services. Libraries can see how they rated, nationally or globally.
Publiclibrariesonline.org is the companion website to the bi-monthly print publication “Public Libraries,” the official magazine of the Public Library Association. Learn more »
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