Sharing Digital Navigators Among Public Libraries

Data Participation Issue Categories

By Thomas Rooney, Data Manager

At the Hamden Public Library, now to be the Hub library, we have seen a wide variety of clients with a whole range of issues. I have found that most of these issues can be broken down into four broad categories of issues: Infrastructural, Digital Literacy, Disengagement, & Technological Stress. The nine Digital Skill and Interest Questions (the questions on a 1-5 scale) as well as the initial questions about the clients’ owned devices and internet connectivity are used to connect the clients’ issues to these four categories.

Additionally, I have broken these categories down into several subcategories that are more clearly defined in their scope. These subcategories are more concrete than their parents but still broad enough to encompass a wide variety of issues that a navigator may encounter in the field. The list of subcategories listed below is not exhaustive but encompasses the most common issues that we encountered in our program.

These subcategories are the topics referred to in the final question on digital navigator form “01 Client Assessment Form” and they appear again in both the “02 Appointment Report” and “03 Client Progress Report” forms. These topics reappear multiple times so that we can track a client’s progress toward meeting their technology goals and hopefully over time see their responses to the Digital Skill and Interests Questions improve as their skill levels increase.

Under the subcategories are real world examples of issues the navigator might help a client within that area. These were included mostly so the navigator would have a better understanding of the nature of the subcategories.

During the initial assessment, navigators discuss with the client what their current technological use patterns are, what issues they are facing and what goals they want to achieve. Using this information the navigator assigns Digital Participation Issue (DPI) subcategory tags to each client. We have the navigator do the assigning of subcategories as they have training on what each of these subcategories mean and what kind of problems they apply to; whereas clients might interpret the subcategories very differently due to experience, lack of knowledge or language differences.

We went this approach as the National Digital Inclusion Alliance forms that we were initially using asked a lot of questions about how clients were currently using technology, but then did very little to track or retest these metrics later to see if there was any improvement in the clients’ skill level. The questions asked of clients did not line up well with the information recorded in the appointment forms. Furthermore as seen above some of these categories are much larger than others. There were implied connections between the client technology goals described in the initial intake and problems worked on in the appointment reports, however these were open to interpretation by both navigator and the client. Furthermore the original categories for tech issues provided by NDIA were too broad to be useful. The “Digital Skills” issue, equivalent to my Digital Literacy Broad category, was present as an issue worked on in 89% of all appointments that we had during our initial year (612 out of 689 appointments). Given that Digital Skills encompasses such a wide range of potential issues that is not surprising but does little to help us narrow down exactly which skills are presenting the most common barriers to participating in digital life to our clients.

Using the DPI subcategories allows us to do several things. First, including these DPI sub-categories in our initial assessment, appointment and client progress report forms, gives us a controlled vocabulary to work with both when analyzing data for our reports and keeping track of clients during the program. Second, it allows us to break down the broad categories into the more granular subcategories, which allows us to make better reports and prepare future navigators of the types of problems that these sorts of programs are likely to encounter.