Wired Wednesday: Infographics, Usage Stats and Advocacy

By: Deirdre Costello, Associate Platform Manager

We here at Credo work hard to provide resources to facilitate the relationships between libraries and users. We recognize that librarians also need to maintain relationships with administrators, and in this time of budgets the size of postage stamps, information conveying the value of the library is often at the core of these relationships.

I’ve written about the basics of infographics before, and I think they hold a lot of promise for conveying usage as more than just numbers when advocating for libraries. There are some libraries and organizations out there that have created some really spectacular examples of using infographics to communicate many different kinds of information:

• OCLC’s How Libraries Stack Up: 2010
• ALA’s U.S. Public Libraries Weather the Storm (complete with metaphor!)
• The Ontario Council of University Libraries’ infographic on their Ask-a-Librarian service statistics
• The University of York’s Library & Archives by the numbers, by Ned Potter, otherwise known as thewikiman
• YALSA also provides some information about using infographics for library advocacy, including tool suggestions.

For more information on free tools for creating resources like these, check out my earlier post on infographics or the YALSA blog post linked above. And if you’ve used infographics to advocate for your library, we’d love to hear your story!