Embedded Files
You can do amazing work, but if your administration and the central district office never learn about it, your budget will still be cut. Advocating effectively for your library means collecting data about your programs and services and using it to create user-friendly and eye-catching communications that tie library services directly to district priorities -- all year long.
You can do amazing work, but if your administration and the central district office never learn about it, your budget will still be cut. Advocating effectively for your library means collecting data about your programs and services and using it to create user-friendly and eye-catching communications that tie library services directly to district priorities -- all year long.
When I lived in Chicago, I watched in horror as the Chicago Public School system systematically eliminated the school library programs from its district schools. By 2022, only 90 of the more than 500 schools in the Chicago Public School District still had school library programs.
I am fortunate that my current school district has placed literacy at the center of its district-wide PAUSD Promise. Even so, when budget crunches come, it is all too easy to forget the crucial role school libraries play in promoting the reading, writing, information, and digital literacy skills our students need to thrive in our social media driven and misinformation-dense world.
That's where data, advocacy, and user-friendly communications come in.
The Digital Library Dashboard
The Digital Library Dashboard
Our library catalogs collect data all year long. Good instructors collect feedback on their collaborations every time. That's a lot of data. Why not share some of it?
During INFO 250, I created three data visualization dashboards that teacher librarians can use with stakeholders based on organization, teacher, and learner-level data. I created the data dashboards using a combination of Google Forms, Google Sheets, and Google Looker Studio.
Organization level
Organization level
Administrators and school boards want to know where the money goes. That's why you will find plenty of the usual statistics - circulation, student visits, # of cotaught lessons, which resources and technologies are used most - on this scorecard. But you will also find data that link the library's work directly to the district's core priorities, like improved student outcomes and support for all types of learners.
To make this dashboard, I combined sample data from all three levels: Learner, Teacher, and Organization.
Teacher level
Teacher level
To have these sorts of impacts on student learning, librarians must collaborate with teachers and faculty at their institutions. Having a separate data dashboard that directly addresses faculty concerns may help with building and maintaining enthusiasm for collaboration between faculty and their school or academic librarians.
The data displayed on this board were specifically chosen to speak directly to instructors about the benefits of these collaborations, in order to encourage more faculty members to work with librarians to embed information literacy instruction in their regular coursework.
Learner level
Learner level
Learner-level data track the students' own experiences.
How often are they coming in?
How do they like the courses?
What technologies and resources are they using?
Are the courses engaging and adapted to meet their needs?
If they are choosing to read, what kinds of books are they reading?
Although you can embed some of this data into a single dashboard along with teacher and organization level data, having a separate data dashboard that speaks directly to the students raises some interesting possibilities. Often the best way to advertise library services to students is to demonstrate that their peers are already using them.
This student-centric dashboard could be embedded in your library's website or displayed on a monitor in your library itself as a way of encouraging students to check out more books, try new resources, or experiment with new technologies. You can also use the dashboard to set a tone for your library community or reinforce your school's values, as shown in the data dashboard below.
A Year-end Infographic
A Year-end Infographic
Whether you have bandwidth to create a data dashboard or not, year's end presents an annual opportunity to link library services to district priorities with an eye-catching infographic. I get many of my best ideas from following other librarians on social media, listening to their podcasts, and reading their blogs. This one is no exception. The original idea for doing a year-end infographic linking our library's programs directly to the district's advertised PAUSD Promise came from a tweet from Kelsey Bogan. (That tweet is sadly no longer available, but Bogan has compiled several other ideas for marketing your school library's work all year round into her blog post, Being Visible & Vocal - Marketing the School Library.)
Below, you can see how I adapted Bogan's idea to promote the work my Teacher Librarian and I had done at our middle school library during the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 school years. My Teacher Librarian and I posted these infographics at our library, in the halls, and emailed electronic copies to stakeholders, including parents, staff, faculty, the PTA, and administrators.
Of the two, the infographic for 2021-2022 appears more subdued, but the fact that it included a diverse reads statistic that tied our work directly to the district's commitment to diversity and equity had our district superintendent talking about it within 24 hours.
That said, I am personally most proud of the fact that for the first time ever in 2022-2023, 75% of the student body voluntarily participated in Book-a-Thon, our annual reading program, as that reflects the increasingly inclusive and welcoming atmosphere my Teacher Librarian and I worked so hard to create in our school library.
The year-end report for 2021-2022. The total circulation number of 13,975 includes both print and ebook circulation, as our ebook vendor at the time provided us with ebook circulation by school and grade. For comparison purposes with 2022-2023 (a year in which I could only tally print circulation), the total number of print books checked out or used in house in 2021-2022 was 9006 books, which works out to roughly 17 books per student. (Credit: Shala Howell via Canva)
In 2022-2023, our ebook vendor changed their reporting so that I could no longer tell the number of ebooks that had been checked out by our students. As a result, I could only tally our print circulation, which had increased by 35% to 23 books per student. (Credit: Shala Howell via Canva)
Read more
You can find more on about my year-end reports and how I chose the data to include on them at my personal blog, Caterpickles:
Credits
Image for The Best Library logo by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.
References
EveryLibrary. (2023, February 16). The secret to better literacy scores starts with school librarians: Cutting school librarians hurts student achievement. https://action.everylibrary.org/the_secret_to_better_literacy_scores_starts_with_school_librarians
Issa, N. (2022, July 18). In an age of misinformation, why are there so few librarians at Chicago Public Schools?: The nation’s third-largest public school system with 290,000 students in 513 district-operated, non-charter schools, CPS has only about 90 schools with full-time librarians. Chicago Sun-Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2022/7/18/23201078/cps-public-schools-librarians-misinformation-budget-cuts-pandemic-literacy-reading-books
Loertscher, D.V., & Todd, R. J. (2018). We boost teaching and learning: Micro documentation measures for Teacher Librarians. Learning Commons Press. https://www.davidloertscherlibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/2018-We-Boost-Teaching-and-Learning.pdf
Loertscher, D. V. (2022). DIY storytelling data visualization: An equity and engagement issue [Video]. ALiVE! https://sites.google.com/view/alivesuperschoollibraries/strategies/partnerships
Palo Alto Unified School District. (2024). The Promise. https://www.pausd.org/promise
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