February 12, 2024: Data Drives but Knowledge Steers

Supervisor:  Renee Kirchner

Monday: 9am-2pm

Today I worked with Lauren Davidson, the bilingual librarian in charge of the Children’s and Adult World Language sections, going over how records and data are used to inform the weeding and purchasing decisions made by librarians.  This part of collection development is a bit nuanced although written protocols are used as a guideline.  Data may indicate that a section is underused or an item has a low circulation rate but the librarian, using written policy as a guide, may decide that a book needs to stay for various reasons.  They may also utilize their budget to see if the section is underused because of a lack of relevance to the community or is in some other way not meeting the community needs.  Depending on the data, a decision to increase purchases in a section may be made, a rearrangement of a section to make it more appealing to patrons, or an increase in allotted budget for a section may all be considered.  The goal is to be good stewards of tax payer money and provide selections that meet the needs of the community.  

Data is obtained by librarians in various ways including Census data, city provided data, patron provided data, collected library data, and custom data reports generated by librarians.  Workflows provides some standard reports with a limited ability to customize reports.  Most of the librarians prefer to use BlueCloud as the final report is easier to read and utilize.  Interestingly, some questions require multiple reports to adequately answer such as questions regarding usage.  Knowledge of both the data systems and the patron profiles become increasingly important as librarians try to develop collections that are relevant, forward looking, and budget friendly.  For example, a  large Russian language collection is none of those things if your community does not have a large Russian segment, the community of interest does not utilize the library, or the budget is too small to adequately collect for the entire collection.  The purchasing librarian must know her patrons, her budget, city demographics (Census data), and her available space.  Collating all the data is time intensive however, the librarians have collection development scheduled intentionally into their calendars!