Weebly website: https://issuesinbcpubliclibraries.weebly.com/ 

Objectives

Our objective for this project  was to create a website with accompanying data visualizations and infographic elements that would provide a broad  indication of trends in various issues concerning B.C. public libraries and Canadian public libraries in general. We chose to include issues surrounding overall  funding for public libraries, the rise of precarious employment among librarians and library staff, and the issues public libraries face  concerning e-books and other e-content. We also included some reported material on the effect Covid-19 has had on these trends.

Data

We previously had a different topic and direction for this project, but unfortunately the saying “biting off more than you can chew” applies here. We found that the available data for the proposed project was far too large and unwieldy, so we decided to pursue a different topic in a related field. The data we access for this final project was collected by the B.C. provincial government and it contains 16 years of data reported by B.C. libraries. 

The original format of the data was in several sheets in a combined Excel workbook. There was no questionnaire key available on the B.C. website’s for this data (https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/bc-public-libraries-statistics-2002-present), that information as only available in the frozen top row of each sheet, and as the questions for each year changed as some field were retired and new ones were added, it was difficult to compile the data into a Tableau-friendly sheet which keeping track of all of them. The final combined Excel file contained 242 columns of data for roughly 70 B.C. library systems over 16 years. The reporting was patchy in some places and some failed calculations appeared in others, still there is plenty of consistent data, especially concerning finances. Minor issues were mostly resolved in Tableau, for some visualizations we created curated Excel files of only the data we wished to use in Tableau.

Visualizations

The visualizations we created were from data over several years and benefited the design aspect to use line charts to show the financial data. In this design we used the basic design elements available in Tableau and did not “mess with it”, “it” being the standard formatting for visualizations in tableau. Since the basic formatting for Tableau visualizations is soft, not harsh on the eyes, and is very direct it matched well with both the design of our Weebly website and the infographic materials we produced with Piktochart. 

News Sources

Both before and after creating the visualizations, we consulted online articles from reputable sources (mostly the various provincial specific reports for CBC news, lots of library drama happening in Newfoundland) for information to apply to the creation of our project. We incorporated a lot of this information into the infographic materials and it informed us in the creation of our visualizations in Tableau, specifically in cherry picking what data to use from the massive amount of data that we cleaned.

Infographic materials

The infographic materials we created for this project were produced using Piktochart. While there are many infographic templates available on Piktochart, we did not directly apply a template to our project, instead choosing a template to delete most of its elements and work from the ground up. Since we were creating graphics for a website rather than a purely a stand alone infographic we made the graphics much larger (2000 px width) to compensate for the width of the website. We also created the infographic with the intent of “breaking it up” into individual panels interspersed with data visualizations from tableau. It was not made to be viewed as one solid infographic (and if you tried to do that it would honestly look kind of ugly). The overall design of the infographic materials favors soft textures with a blue and grey color palette. The only time blue and grey are not used are for impact, or when they cannot be applicable to certain graphics. Piktochart already has some great face-masked illustrations that we incorporated into a recurring section at the bottom of each infographic segment.

Website

We decided to create a website through Weebly as a much easier route for compiling all the parts of the final project, which includes a slideshow of static visualizations and the compiled information from several news stories on the subject in infographic form. Weebly was fairly easy to use for a free online tool and any drawbacks we might have encountered did not unduly hinder us.