Telling Stories with Library Data: Visualization Projects and Tools

This session took place on May 11, 2021, as part of the ARLIS/NA Virtual Conference hosted by the ARLIS/NA MOQ Chapter. Presenters include William Blueher, Michael Cummings, Catherine Derose, Lindsay King, and Alex O'Keefe. The presentations focus on how libraries can leverage their data to create meaningful visual narratives and gain new insights about themselves. Blueher and Cummings shared a case study from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library. In their presentation, they explore how Power BI can be used to analyze a library's data and tell a compelling story. Transforming numbers into narratives gives stakeholders a deeper insight into the impact of the library. Derose, King, and O'Keefe share a second case study on Ensemble@Yale, which is a crowdsourced transcription project that enlists volunteers to generate structured metadata from digitized performance programs in the archives. Both case studies include demonstrations of tools for data collection, cleaning, visualization. These tools include Power BI, Zooniverse's Project Builder, OpenRefine, Gephi, and Tableau.