ARLIS/NA 49th Annual Conference

Libraries can leverage their data to create meaningful visual narratives and gain new insights about themselves. A case study of the use of Power BI, a powerful data visualization tool provided by Microsoft, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library explores how a library's data can be visualized to tell a compelling story. Transforming numbers into narratives gives stakeholders a deeper insight into the impact of the library. A second case study, Ensemble@Yale, highlights a crowdsourced transcription project that enlists volunteers to generate structured metadata from digitized performance programs in the archives. The ultimate goal is to create a searchable database of people and productions, as well as datasets for more experimental visualizations. A demonstration of tools including Power BI, Project Builder, OpenRefine, Gephi, and Tableau will highlight out-of-the-box options for data collection, cleaning, visualization, and sharing.