Hello, world!
We can all agree that these are strange times we are living through. Here at the Library Research Service, we’ve been thinking about how we can help. What skills could we share that might be useful to library staff and our communities?
As library and information professionals, before this pandemic we already spent a lot of time thinking about information, what it means, and how reliable it is. Here at LRS, we are data geeks in addition to being regular library geeks, so we think about data a lot too—the good, the bad, and the misleading.
Critically analyzing information is what librarians are trained to do. We can’t help ourselves. For me, this means every time I talk to my mom and she shares a statistic with me, I ask her about her source. I’m not trying to be a pain. This is just how my mind works.
Right now, we are all seeing a lot of data about the pandemic, and it can be challenging to understand. And this is where we come in.
Let’s be clear: we are not epidemiologists, we are not medical doctors, we are not experts in public health. We are not going to provide data about COVID-19 or interpretations. There are already good resources for both, and we don’t think it would help to add our voices.
What we can do—and we are going to do—is share strategies for looking at data with a critical eye. We’re going to cover a different strategy every two weeks, like thinking about the underlying data behind a visualization, identifying bias, evaluating the credentials of different experts, understanding that how the data are presented can impact how you perceive them, and how to find multiple perspectives on the same information.
We will also discuss how to engage with data carefully, with your mental well-being in mind. Data can make us feel a lot of things, and we all need to take care of ourselves.
This series is inspired by the current situation, but the examples we will share will focus on other topics. You can use these strategies with any kind of data.
We look forward to seeing you here every other Wednesday and hope that these strategies are helpful in this time of information overload. In the meantime, if you’d like some less serious data about a situation that many of us can relate to right now, check out this pie chart.
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