RAILS

Steve Thomas: Jeanette, Grant, welcome to Circulating Ideas.

Janette Derucki: Thank you so much. We’re excited to be here to talk with you today.

Grant Halter: Yeah, great to be here.

Steve Thomas: Could you each start by talking a little about what got you interested in librarianship as a profession in the first place?

Grant Halter: Yeah, I can go ahead. I have a bit of an odder track to libraries. I started in libraries back in 2016 at the Oak Park Public Library, suburbs of Chicago, not with a library degree. I started as a data analyst at that library, which was the first time they had that position. It was very exciting. My background is in applied mathematics and anthropology, and I was like, “What do I do with this?” I have several family members who work for public libraries and they were like, “Hey, this job’s open. You should go work for libraries.” And here I am seven years later. At that role, I was doing all kinds of different data things, writing surveys, talking strategic planning, gathering data, sharing data, analyzing presentations, all that kind of fun stuff. And kind of fell in love with the work and all the benefits that come with working in the public sphere and getting to use data and math and all that was the cherry on top.

I was there for about two and a half years and the RAILS position opened up and I’m doing a lot of the same stuff, just at a different scale with the regional system here, lots more surveys and writing formulas and data research and analysis and steadily growing this data analysis department team. So excited for the future coming on.

Janette Derucki: Yeah, my track to librarianship was a little bit different as well. I’m a second career librarian. I was previously an audiologist. I have a master’s degree in audiology and hearing science. I got to a point in my career where I had taken a break from that profession and I either needed to go back to school to update my credentials or choose another direction.

So for me, the things I enjoyed about that profession and that field, health literacy was a big part of it. I enjoyed connecting with patients and helping them get the resources that they needed to make decisions about their treatment and their health. In talking with a couple of friends who are librarians, they suggested that this might be an avenue I would explore so in 2019, I entered the Master of Information program at Rutgers University, fully intending to be a health sciences or a consumer health librarian in some way, shape or form.

But while I was there, I entered into their data science concentration and I thought that was a great meshing of those two fields, right? A way to take health data, which is really interesting and something that impacts our lives every day, and still work towards helping people learn to understand and apply that in a librarianship field.

After I graduated, I actually stayed on at Rutgers to work with one of my professors on a research project. About the time that that was wrapping up, RAILS had an opening for a data assistant to work on their school library data project, so I applied for that and then I joined RAILS in January 2022, and then I’ve stayed on since then full time as of July, 2022, to do a lot more work than just the school library project, although that does remain my primary focus.

Steve Thomas: Very cool. Yeah, the vast majority of the library field are a bunch of English majors looking for jobs. So we need you science and math people to help us out with data, and I have a lot of librarian friends from Illinois, and at some point, a decade or so back, I came to speak at Illinois Library Association, and RAILS comes up a lot. For people outside of the Illinois area, can you just give a brief overview of what RAILS is?

Grant Halter: Yeah, so RAILS is a regional library system, an intergovernmental agency. Technically we’re directly below the state library in Illinois, which is a part of the Secretary of State’s office. We cover most of the northern half of the state. There’s kind of a diagonal line that cuts down to the west. We service public, academic, school, and specialized libraries in the state. They all have to apply for membership and certify every year to be members of the organization where we provide delivery services for those libraries, continuing education, grant programs.

Janette Derucki: We do offer some brokering services, so we’ll broker for deals and discount programs like to leverage volume discounts for our members. A lot of it is just really resource and advocacy and support for the profession.

Steve Thomas: And it’s that section of Illinois minus Chicago Public, right, because they’re their own thing.

That’s right.

Janette Derucki: It is worth noting, though, that we do serve, in the RAILS service area, we do serve Chicago Public Schools. So it’s kind of an interesting intermingling of support and resources for that school system, because they do heavily rely on Chicago Public Libraries for some resources, but the rest of their support comes from RAILS.

Grant Halter: Yeah, and we also have our largest concentration of academic and specialized libraries in the Chicago area that we service as well.

Steve Thomas: Thank you. How does RAILS address the challenges of serving a vast geographic region with services like interlibrary loans and other things like that?

Grant Halter: So that’s a hot topic in RAILS. One way we do that is through our LLSAP support grant, LLSAP stands for Local Library System Automation Program, that we offer to effectively consortia to encourage resource sharing and it’s kind of left there broadly and they’re welcome to do what they want with the money. That’s a significant portion of our overall budget that we give to those consortia.

There’s currently six LLSAPs in the RAILS service area and they cover just about all of the service area of RAILS. It’s probably an analysis for you to do of how many total square miles that LLSAPs cover versus the standalones and the unserved. That’s a big piece.

Of course, all the rural areas, the whole state’s covered by our delivery services, but the LLSAPs certainly help the reach and help get those grant funds to the local level to support them and where they need it.

Janette Derucki: Right, and RAILS as a system completed a service inequity study because we are a multi type library system, and if you look into a research library system in any way, shape or form that are of this nature, inequity is something that comes up pretty frequently in those documents. So we’re looking at making sure that we are serving our members in the way that best meets their needs and the way that they can best connect with us to provide those resources.

There’s a high density of organizations and institutions in Chicago, and we want to make sure that we’re offering the same type of support to those agencies outside of Chicago as we are to within. It’s tricky to meet those needs sometimes, and it means sometimes offering several variations of the same program or just using different methods of communication to reach them. During the course of conducting that study, we actually realized and experienced one of the forms of inequity ourselves because we were trying to form some focus groups, and we had several small rural libraries who basically told us, “Look, we don’t have staff that are available for one hour to participate in a live Zoom. There’s just not the staffing or personnel for that.” So we had to reevaluate our research methods and alternately give them an asynchronous method to participate because we don’t want to lose their participation, so it’s really how can we meet their needs in that way?

We do have a resource sharing initiative that is trying to reach non automated and currently unconnected, I guess, for lack of a better word, libraries in the state and it’s called Find More Illinois. So it’s our statewide resource sharing. If I had to use really generic terms to describe it, I would say it’s like the state alternative to OCLC.

Grant Halter: It’s available for automated libraries and consortia. The goal by its creation was for those smaller libraries that couldn’t afford to be automated.

Janette Derucki: And there’s a branch of it right now that is exploring automation options for non-automated libraries which I think is really important because I feel like that is something that a lot of libraries face, right? I was kind of flabbergasted when I realized how many non-automated libraries there are. You just assume, like, your kid goes to school, and there’s a computer where they search for their books, and you go to the public library, and everything’s scanned, and whatever, but that’s really not the reality still in a lot of places. I mean, I’m preaching to the choir. I don’t really need to be on my soapbox, but it is one of those programs that we have that I’m really hoping that we’re going to actually have more of a role in the data work that they do. That’s one of the reasons the mapping is actually really important for that project.

Grant Halter: Yeah, that goes along with, is it, it might be a state statute that will go into effect either next year or 2025 that all libraries have to have web automated version or catalog accessible via the web, something like that.

Janette Derucki: I think they were already supposed to have it. I think it was 2023 or 2024.

Grant Halter: They need a plan. They didn’t have to be automated, but they needed a plan to show that they were going to be.

Steve Thomas: They’re on the path.

Janette Derucki: Right, and a lot of them just can’t afford it, which is really sad in this day and age.

Steve Thomas: Could you talk a little bit about the eRead Illinois program?

Grant Halter: Yeah, the eRead program is an e-content library that RAILS manages for our members. It’s a service that our members pay into and all of the money goes into building that collection. So RAILS operates the platform and both purchases items and keeps the platform current. During the COVID pandemic, it really jumped in in usage. A lot of libraries, especially school libraries were hopping on the platform just to get access to more materials. Because we run it internally, we can offer it at a pretty affordable price for a lot of our member libraries compared to some other big vendor competitors. It’s a nice option to have for those small libraries.

Janette Derucki: Right. We just celebrated the 10 year anniversary of eREAD, but the one thing that’s great about eREAD is it is a statewide program, so outside of RAILS, one of the other library systems, Illinois Heartland Library System, they do also offer their own version of eREAD for their members as well, or non-IHLS members can subscribe to our platform so that they can access the same resource sharing through eREAD.

Steve Thomas: Great. Another program, the SLIDE project, had informed the creation of the later project, the SLATE project. Can you talk about the findings of the initial project and then the motivations between moving that into the SLATE project?

Janette Derucki: Yeah, absolutely. The SLIDE project was a three year IMLS grant-funded project that was looking at the evolution of school librarianship on a national level. One of the primary investigators of that project, Keith Curry Lance, contacted a couple of library organizations in Illinois because there was a lack of data for our school libraries at the national level.

That project has actually just concluded; it wrapped up in August. There are a couple of really pertinent findings that are relevant to things in Illinois. One of the main findings was that the funding for school libraries exists, but it’s largely determined based on the priorities of administrators. It’s not that the school districts lack funds to provide a school library or certified and qualified school library staff, it’s that they’re choosing not to because they’re prioritizing something else. States where school library mandates are in effect and enforced tend to have lesser rates of decline of school librarians.

In Illinois, we do require each school to have a school librarian. There is a state mandate for a certified school librarian, but none of that is being enforced at the state level. So we have two documents that govern our schools: the administrative code and the school code. The school code is essentially the state board of education’s governing documents, and those two codes don’t really agree about what a certified or qualified school librarian is. So the definition of that position is a little bit a hot topic for us lately.

The third point is that there’s just a general overall shortage of educators, and so shortages of qualified personnel impacted the profession as a whole. So we have that experience in Illinois as well, like we are definitely experiencing a shortage of certified school library information specialists. We currently only have about 1400 according to our state Board of Education’s statistics, and we have over 3000 schools in our state. So it’s impossible for us right now to provide a certified library information specialist to every public school.

The position that I’m in, our project came out of Keith Curry Lance approaching these library organizations in our state to ask about the data at the national level, and, you know, half of the data that was the for Illinois was missing. We did confirm that early on in our project. We couldn’t find it either. I will tell you that the National Center for Education Statistics data for Illinois is still incorrect. So we frequently monitor it after it’s been updated. They are reporting no librarians for some school districts where we know there are librarians.

So it’s working with our State Board of Education to resolve those data mismatches in a way that’s sustainable is definitely an end goal of our project, but in the interim, we have taken it upon ourselves as an organization to collect the data. We’ve been doing that so far through our annual certification process, which is when libraries recertify for system membership, asking school districts to provide some information about their staff, their finances and their collections that way, but we’re getting ready to move that outside of the certification process so that hopefully we can get more detailed data by going directly to school librarians, so that’s our hope there and that this is a sustainable way to collect and measure and keep this data going out into the future.

One of our main goals is to provide a resource for school librarians to advocate for their themselves and their profession, and we’re going to do that by providing a dashboard that’s going to be made available online, where they can view the data that we have collected for their schools and use that to compare themselves to other school districts of similar size, location, setting, and hopefully learn a little bit more about themselves and other school districts that will make a difference going forward.

Grant Halter: Our strategy behind developing the dashboard came from needing a sustainable strategy for collecting and maintaining the school data because we know there’s a lot of turnover in school. The data can be there one year and missing the next year, so we wanted to create a strategy to help, to encourage the schools and school libraries to trust us with their data, because certainly giving up your data can be a nervy thing sometimes. You don’t know where it’s going, who’s going to use it, what are they going to use it for? We want to provide a tool that was fully accessible by all the school librarians so that they can use that information to advocate for their libraries and their services going forward.

Janette Derucki: Right. And I want to mention, too, I think it’s important to note that this isn’t just a problem in Illinois, right? So we know that our state Board of Education does not regularly collect and report data about school librarians in our state, but I am also part of a multi-state collective of other data professionals in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, Rhode Island, so it’s really nationwide that we’re experiencing this.

A lot of the data professionals from either the state library organizations or system organizations like RAILS are banding together to determine what is the best way to approach this issue. Some of those organizations are part of their state Department of Education, so they have maybe a more direct pipeline to making change in those organizations than we do at RAILS, but it’s not to say that we have reached a stopping point either. We’re all working together to find our best way forward to make sure that we’re best representing school librarians and the work that they’re doing.

Steve Thomas: You also have used dashboards for a number of purposes. How do you all use those dashboards both internally and externally?

Grant Halter: Yeah, that’s been my go-to since back when I was at Oak Park Public Library, but when I came to RAILS, that was the easiest way to help build data literacy amongst the staff, but then also have platforms that makes it easy to share data with our member libraries as well. So I started out with just Google Data Studio, now called Google Looker Studio Dashboards, and that’s a fairly straightforward tool where you can input some spreadsheet data and make some useful graphs and charts. And I use those internally, mostly to share data and start the conversation with our staff, whether it’s a survey, whether it’s a formula we’re building, or just some insights that will be useful for making strategic decisions or just guiding any of their programs. So that’s kind of been the go to for that.

A lot of people learn different ways, so sometimes I keep it as a spreadsheet, just numbers and tables, but other managers prefer to see the insights or the graphs or the charts. So it kind of varies, but that’s also how I learned, being able to explore the data through these dashboards and build different charts to kind of uncover those different trends or patterns. It’s been really impactful for uncovering those insights. Probably 70 percent of the dashboards I make are internal just because that’s how we talk about data at RAILS.

Then there’s several that are posted online on our website. We have a “Data in Libraries” page on the RAILS website that I’ve posted several about the IPLAR, the statewide public library report. We had a COVID dashboard up showing closings, which I think is still up there, but it’s certainly dormant at this point. We have services such as BiblioBoard, which we offer statewide, and we share data back to our members who use that so that they can go back and share those results with their libraries and their boards. They’re all very dynamic and constantly updating. I think it’s a great way to give libraries access to data, both seeing what a dashboard could look like and give them ideas to build their own, but also just make the data more accessible so that they can turn around for their own advocacy purposes and learning within their buildings.

Janette Derucki: And we’re hearing from several of our public library members especially, asking for more resources related to data where they can view things more easily, help them build their monthly and quarterly reports more easily. So I think that this is something that librarians overall are looking at more greatly as they’re asked to provide more information to their boards and their stakeholders.

Grant Halter: Yeah, and on that point, oftentimes the data is publicly available, whether it’s in the annual public library report or other places, just in spreadsheet form, and it takes a certain type of person to really dig into those tables of numbers and build insight. So, I’ve gotten a lot of requests from libraries to build static dashboards or static infographics that they can just plug their own data into, select their library, it populates with their numbers, and they could show their director or the show their boards or their communities. So that’s another way that Jeanette and I are using our data skills to help libraries that may not have data staff at their library, or they don’t have the time. They can’t afford to build the dashboards or gather the data themselves. So that’s how we try to give back to our members and help make that whole process a little more efficient.

Janette Derucki: I think the challenges that most libraries are bringing to us is twofold, it’s skills and capacity. They don’t have the capacity to do the data work themselves, so how can we help them make that easier and meet those needs? But then also, a lot of data stuff does require a specific skill set, whether it’s Excel or one of these other platforms or tools that we’ve used like Tableau, Power BI, some things that people may be familiar with. While we’re not really training people how to use those things, we do realize that there is some skill level that’s necessary to do basic things, and we can help people to get to the point where they’ve built a reusable spreadsheet to put their data and where they’re just plug it in and it’s going to crank out what they need.

Funding and access is definitely a limitation. So you learn what you have, or if you have someone who has a particular skill set, that might be the tool you’re forced to use, because that’s what you know.

Grant Halter: This may be a tangent, but I often compare what we do in libraries to how communications departments have started to grow in especially the public libraries 10, 20 years ago, where they were just specialists that certainly there were staff at the libraries doing communications work, building websites, writing e newsletters and stuff like that, but bringing in outside specialties can kind of ease the weight off the library staff in some ways just to have those specialists do the work and kind of everyone benefits moving forward like that.

Steve Thomas: Well, I’m going to maybe indulge in the data nerdery of you all, but certainly for the listeners who are big data nerds, I’m going to let you talk about data nerd stuff. So can you give us an overview of those programming languages and platforms that you’re using to do your data analysis? You can go as deep as you want here.

Janette Derucki: One of the things, I will say just before we get into like the nitty gritty of the different tools and languages is that it’s been nice for Grant and I to work together. I’ve been really fortunate to come on to RAILS where he was already present because we have complementary, but completely different skill sets, I think. So he’s going to talk about some tools that I maybe have dabbled in, but don’t know as well as he does, but I probably have some different languages that I go to versus what he’s going to share.

Grant Halter: Right. So, what I learned in school and just kind of stumbled onto and kept going is a coding language called R, which I learned and developed my skills through the math program when I was in college and kept around. R is effectively a fancy tool for statistical packages and running mathematical models in fancy stuff like that, which I’m not doing a ton of at RAILS, but those skills certainly have come into play of automating a lot of our tasks of gathering big data. It can handle all those things a lot smoother than something like Excel when you have a hundred thousand rows or a million rows or something like that. It can whip through data cleaning operations. It can help you find errors and missing data and manage that very smoothly, but also run calculations and add columns and rows and all that fun stuff a lot more efficiently than something like Excel, which is my default.

 Let me be honest: I start everything in Excel unless I know it’s too big. And then as it’s developed, depending if it’s turning into a dashboard or if I need to download the data from a website or somewhere, throw it into R and then bring it back out into Excel or even Google Sheets, depending on what formulas and what tools we’re using and pull the data where it’s needed. There’s not one tool I go to every time necessarily. So R, Excel, Google Sheets, Google Data Studio are the core things that I’ve used. Jeanette has brought me into the light, we’re moving into Tableau dashboards, as well as ArcGIS, which are going to be fun, fancy tools that we’ve used, I’ve previously used QGIS for our mapping, which is an open source GIS software. Because of the size of RAILS as a service area, it’s been really useful to visualize data using that tool and it takes a little bit to warm up to tools like R and Q just can have a little bit of a learning curve, but they’re certainly valuable. We use all of these things just about every day.

Janette Derucki: I’ll say where Grant mostly uses R, I mostly use Python. I did learn both R and Python. They’re very similar and maybe there are a lot of people out there who do have experience using both, but for me, I abandoned developing my R skills in favor of Python, just because the programming libraries, the coding libraries associated with that language have really exploded and there’s a lot of development happening around that language, both for web development and data analysis.

So to me, it was like, I’m going to put all my eggs in this basket, essentially, and it has worked well. I use it a lot of the same ways that Grant does. It’s for analysis. Any of the data nerds out there who are listening can understand that, like, 80 percent of your time is spent cleaning, so anything you can do to make your life easier on that front and automate those processes, we do that.

Grant Halter: In general, we would advise for any of the aspiring coders out there, pick a language and stick with it. It’s better to be really good at one language than try to know a little bit about a lot of languages.

Janette Derucki: Right. And I will say too, don’t be discouraged if you’re someone who says, “I didn’t learn this in school. I don’t have a data science background.” I would say the majority of the workforce in data science is self-taught to some degree. The field itself and the languages change so much, you have to be able to teach yourself just to keep up with it. Excel is a primary starting place, mostly because you open your data in a spreadsheet like 99.9% of the time, and there’s some things that you can just very easily manipulate in there that would take longer to write a script than it would to just do this in Excel. So we do rely on that heavily.

For visualization, I use a handful of online open source tools, Visme, Data Wrapper, Canva, like for infographics and things, yeah, for sure. If people out there do have experience using Canva, which is an online graphics platform, there are some very basic charts you can create in there, and a lot of librarians are using those bar charts, line charts, pie charts just to create things that they need for their monthly reports, which is a really great resource.

We explored Microsoft Power BI for a bit, which is a great tool. We decided that for us, it didn’t really meet our needs. It’s really great for business analytics and business reporting, maybe not so much for an organization like RAILS and the things that we’re trying to convey. We have decided to shift focus to Tableau. That’s where the school library data dashboard that I’m developing currently is all being built in Tableau. That’ll be posted online and accessible that way. We’re going to use that hopefully for some of our internal and external dashboards going forward. We’re excited about the way that it’s going to let us layer more data into those dashboards than some of the other tools we’ve been using. Grant mentioned ArcGIS, which I’m so excited about that, because if anybody has mapping experience, it’s like the gold standard of mapping tools right now, and it has a great integration with Tableau. It’s going to let us just really represent information visually and spatially in a way that we are not currently doing to make all the data that we have access to more accessible to our members.

Grant Halter: Yeah. ArcGIS is a big one. We’ve been hearing from the members they’re hungry for mapping tools that they can use for their local service areas. So one of the projects on our list is to develop service area demographics in map form for our library members so that they can grab those maps and use them where they needed to make decisions. By no means are Jeanette or I experts in GIS, but there’s a barrier to entry that prevents a lot of people, so providing that kind of mapping service for our members is going to be a big, big win.

Janette Derucki: Right, and I’ll just say to make that a little more tangible to some of the requests we’re getting from members, I actually was in a meeting just the other day where someone again asked for a map about unserved populations in Illinois and how that intersects with school districts and public library districts and in Illinois, just for a frame of reference, we do have over a million people who still don’t have access to library services. So it is important to understand, especially when we’re talking about school libraries and education, where those pockets are, and how to get services and resources to those students, especially if their school library is in jeopardy.

Steve Thomas: Can you talk about RAILCAR, which is about sharing data?

Grant Halter: Yes. So RAILCAR is still in the dream phase at the moment. We’re making progress towards developing it, but in essence, RAILCAR just stands for “rail” as in RAILS, our organization name, and IPLAR, the Illinois public library report. But “RAILCAR” is nice and catchy. The idea behind RAILCAR is, at RAILS, we gather a lot of data, we also bring in a lot of external data and it can get mished and mashed all over with different versions and some spreadsheets getting updated, others not. So RAILCAR was the idea behind making sure organization wide, we have better standardization of the datasets that we use, that the resources are documented so that when new people come on, they can hop on quickly, but also that the data is updated organization wide. And that is a tall task because we have a lot of different sources and a lot of different mechanisms in the background that IT manages a lot of the times to house that data And apply it to the various services and formulas and tools that we offer for our staff, but also to our members.

We’ve talked to several other colleagues in the library system world that have similar dreams of this kind of standardized data collection tool, but we haven’t had a ton of success getting other inspiration. We’re certainly open to any ideas. If anyone out there is hearing this, please give us a call. We would love to talk through what this idea could be and how we can more efficiently approach it. So that’s the big dream is just to get all of the data that we use in a simple place that’s accessible to more than just the data people at the organization, essentially.

Janette Derucki: This is really a way for us to combat our data becoming siloed. One of the things we have realized about our organization is that a lot of people are tracking things that are applied directly to their personal work, but the type of system that we are, there’s not a lot of duplication of function. So those files don’t get shared outside of their own personal work. I was conducting the system service and equity study, I was looking for data about our organization, how we engage with our membership. There is no central data source for RAILS. It requires going to each individual person and asking how are you serving our members? And in many cases, they had that readily available, but even us as the data team weren’t always aware that those files existed. So it’s really trying to bring all of that together in a way that helps us make better data driven decisions as an organization.

Steve Thomas: Can you talk about the Agencies of Impact economic study and give a little sneak peek of when that’s going to be available to the public?

Janette Derucki: Yeah, sure. So this is a data study that we recently completed. It was inspired by, I think it was a 2003 OCLC report about the impact of libraries on the economy globally. They explored at the national level and at the global level how libraries change things. So what we did was took a look at libraries at the national level and then within our state itself. We were looking at different things like how are they as far as comparing to other industries with regard to spending and the value of library services, looking at logistics, so how well do we circulate our materials that we provide to our communities compared to a logistics expert like FedEx or Amazon and the number of patrons we have compared to the number of patrons they have.

We looked at libraries as valued destinations, so the number of visitors per year and how did that compare to attendance at all of the professional and NCAA football and basketball events that occurred within a certain time period? I will tell you the most interesting finding people keep citing this over and over is it was like two and a half times as many people visit libraries as attend any of those events, so they’re very well visited agencies.

We looked at libraries as global information suppliers, so access to materials and information: print materials, digital materials, and what does the print collection look like, and just for public libraries in Illinois, we have enough print materials to provide three items per person statewide. So it’s a lot of materials. Then the value of those collections is in the millions of dollars.

And then finally, we looked at librarians themselves as a profession and how does that compare to other professions? And also, how does it compare to just the populations of other U. S. cities, right? So the number of librarians in the U. S. compared to the population of say, Charlottesville, Virginia or something like that. Within the state of Illinois, like there’s about 10,000 librarians in Illinois. How does that compare to other professions? It’s about on par with dentists is what we found. So, just some interesting tidbits like that.

Steve Thomas: Well, thank you both for coming on the podcast and talking about this. I understood everything except maybe that data nerd section there, but I’m sure there are a lot of people who were excited about that.

Janette Derucki: It’s fun to be able to talk about it. There’s not a lot of venues in which we’re asked to talk about our nerdy data side. So this is great. Thank you for the opportunity.

Grant Halter: Yeah. This has been great. Thank you so much.

Steve Thomas: Have a great day.