Exciting New Course: LIS S604 Section 32611 Community and Data

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This exciting new course counts as a new option to fulfill the public library and academic library specialization core course requirements and is recommended as an elective for the digital curation specialization. Also, well suited to the generalist degree.

Community and Data

Data are a powerful source for helping communities’ decision-making, program assessment, and program design. Collecting sound data and intelligently using existing open data are consistently important tasks for many community entities (e.g., public libraries, local governments, and non-profit community-based organizations) so that they may evaluate the results of their own work and tell the story of that work to residents, funders, and other important stakeholders. Open data are particularly helpful for 1) diagnosing community problems and designing community services (e.g., social and library services), 2) securing funding and verifying needs, 3) evaluating programs, 4) highlighting community strengths, and 5) fostering policy changes.

This course introduces the concept of open data in the context of community work, the impact of this data, as well as the data literacy skills necessary for identifying data sources and applying them to a given context. Students will explore existing open data and tools. Half of this course will be devoted to project-based learning, in which students will use relevant open data and work with any community entity of interest to them.

Learning Outcomes

Analyze communities’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as their data needs.

Evaluate conditions of existing community data in the context of community work.

Evaluate existing data ecosystems in the context of community data work.

Evaluate existing open data tools for the community work context.

Analyze legal and policy constraints on communities’ data utilization.

Assess and develop the data literacy skills necessary for accomplishing community data work.

Create a data report (presentation) by utilizing existing data to meet the chosen community entity’s needs.