Brooklyn Public Library
Written by Dgiles on Tue, 02/02/2016 – 14:11
Help Brooklyn Public Library find, gather, and use data to better target library services and build partnerships in our communities. Part of this will involve locating and using publically available demographic data about our communities and their needs, and part will involve helping us to streamline and coordinate our own data collection efforts while maintaining BPL’s standards of patron privacy. For example, in the first category, we could use Census and government agency data to discover where in our service areas linguistically isolated seniors, disconnected youth, and recent refugees are concentrated so we can do more outreach and tailor our services to better meet the needs of these groups. In the second category, we could analyze anonymized trends in our circulation, reference, and program databases to learn more about the library’s most popular languages and age groups and how these different populations are making use of library resources. We expect to find lots of interesting insights when these two data categories are blended together. The fellow should have extensive experience using open source data and common demographic databases (e.g. IPUMS) and know how to use geolocation software (e.g. GIS).