Dispatches, by Hsuanwei Michell Chen

Design and Conquer

May 1, 2017

Be clear and concise. Ensure that the data you are illustrating is comprehensive and accurate. The goal is to convey the greatest number of ideas in the smallest amount of space in the shortest number of words. A good resource to review for inspiration is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte. … Continue reading Design and Conquer


Data journalist David McCandless keynotes at the 2017 ACRL conference in Baltimore.

The Importance and Beauty of Information

March 23, 2017

ACRL Executive Director Mary Ellen Davis began the proceedings by emphasizing ACRL’s mission of covering the trends and issues in academic and research librarianship and higher education. Davis said the conference was ACRL’s largest to date, with more than 3,400 attendees from 29 countries and all 50 states. American Library Association President Julie B. Todaro’s … Continue reading The Importance and Beauty of Information


Linda Hofschire

Let’s Get Visual

November 1, 2016

There is a better way. I work at Colorado State Library’s Library Research Service and several years ago we took a step back to think about how we were presenting our research findings, which were mostly thick reports full of statistical jargon. What prompted this reflection was feedback from school librarians about our best-known body … Continue reading Let’s Get Visual


In Practice by Meredith Farkas

Worth a Thousand Words

November 1, 2016

One technique I tried was putting all of the comments into Wordle, a tool that creates word clouds showing by size the relative frequency of each word. One of the largest terms in the cloud was quiet. Our library had been focused on building and enhancing collaborative spaces, so the word cloud provided a valuable … Continue reading Worth a Thousand Words