Sharing Digital Navigators Among Public Libraries

Using Data to Tell Your Library's Story

Librarians are always talking about using data to tell a story.  In the case of digital navigation, telling the full story can lead to new funding for such desperately needed services from towns, philanthropic organizations, or state programs. Your group of participating libraries needs to decide on the ideal data points for your project, and, then craft intake, appointment progress, and exit forms that allow the navigators to collect information from clients about their connectivity needs.

Appointment progress forms also allow one to capture client opinions regarding the degree to which their connectivity needs were satisfied by mentoring and device distribution. An important part of this process is a system to anonymize the information. Clients were also encouraged to speak in their name and provide reflections on the process in the form of testimonials about their experience. For some clients, this was an act that affirmed their agency and eagerness to advocate for continued navigation services. 

In addition, a sharing navigation plans needs to collect the information that will allow you to evaluate the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the collaboration. Thus, the team was eager to note which libraries referred clients, at what location they actually received services, and the degree to which the resulting flexibility, often involving special language instruction, improved service. 

For the Connecticut State Library project: "Designing and Implementing a Replicable Regional Navigator Sharing Plan," participating libraries with adjacent Housing and Urban Development grants were already required to collect a good deal of demographic data and the group could see the value of being able to present a detailed demographic snapshot of who was served. Therefore, we chose to create a data set that was based on gathering as much of this information from clients as possible, while adding data points that would allow us to measure, as best we could, the value of a model in which navigators were shared among libraries and moved across library catchment areas.  In order to avoid having such data collection become an obstacle to client comfort and trust, navigators were trained to explain the fund-seeking purpose of the data collection, to solicit the information in a conversational way, and always respect a client's disinclination to share. 

For a full outline of this schema, please see a pdf of the full document below.  For another treatment of the Digital Participation Issue Categories, please see the page "Why Do Clients Make Appointments?"

These forms and a full statistical report using the data collected are linked below on this page.