Data Storytelling: Structures and Strategies

DESCRIPTION
Despite collecting a tremendous amount of data on activities related to their collections, services, and spaces, libraries often struggle to use the right data to tell the right stories to the right stakeholders. This can be particularly challenging when there is a mismatch between what external stakeholders value (for example, the number of volumes held) doesn't align with what the library understands to be meaningful (for example, the number of titles held).

Library UX Chicago was delighted to offer a workshop exploring effective storytelling with data. Dr. Kate McDowell was our speaker; her talk was paired with discussion and activities designed to introduce the fundamentals of storytelling thinking in the context of library data.

Attendees learned strategies for applying principles of storytelling to the workplace, and explored ways that these principles can be used to express the value of libraries to internal and external stakeholders. They explored successful story structures for data stories, and worked with sample or real library data to find stories that they could develop at their institutions. Finally, attendees will learned how to effectively learn and remember their stories.
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This event took place on Friday, May 4 from 9am-noon at the University of Chicago Library. 

Library UX Chicago acknowledges the generous support of the Reaching Across Illinois Library System (RAILS)  continuing education program in making this event possible.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER
Dr. Kate McDowell is an associate professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, where her courses include youth services librarianship, history of readers, and storytelling. Her areas of research focus include storytelling practices and applications in higher education, non-profits, business, and public service, and she has taught storytelling in a number of contexts for a decade.