Once upon a time
This is a story about storytellers. Our story begins with librarians realizing that they did not have the data they needed to tell good stories about how patrons were using digital resources. This was frustrating before, but it became worse when the pandemic hit: without data, it's hard to show the impact of libraries on their communities.
So, some technologists (part of 10x, a Federal idea accelerator in the General Services Administration), researchers (at the Institute of Museum and Library Services), and librarians across the country started working together to solve this problem. They wanted the solution to be affordable (so it would be within the budget of even the smallest of libraries to take part), open (so the people would own the work), and scalable (so it could serve every library in the nation).
This is the story of the challenge we have tackled, the solution we've developed, and how you can join us in this work.
Libraries provide many essential services to their communities. One of those services is access to information, a cornerstone of literacy.
The web is a critical part of that access. Unfortunately, it is hard for libraries (there's around 20,000 of them) to even count how many people are using their networked services. We're not talking about what people are using the network for; we're saying it is hard to even say how many people used the network. Those numbers, though, are critical to making the case for providing improved access and services in this space. For example, under pandemic conditions, many libraries made improvements to their networks in order to provide better access to their users, but many libraries cannot speak in concrete terms as to how many people benefited from those improvements.
We thought we would build a wifi estimator. Or, put simply, a "wifi sensor." We took a small computer asked it to count how many wifi devices it saw every day.
We realized we could keep track of how long devices were nearby without collecting anything about the devices. This way, we protect the privacy of the people, while still being able to estimate how many people visited the library, and for how long.
We're experimenting.
First, we collaborated with 20 libraries, who tried things out. They helped us see what is possible.
Now (Q4 2022), with IMLS, we're working with the state of Georgia to roll more devices out to more libraries. This will let us test a number of hypotheses about the data itself, and verify that our tools can scale to several hundred libraries.
Our goal is to see at least 25% of libraries in 25 states working together to collect this data, share their understandings, and (in doing so) inform next steps in conversations about what the data means and how we should go forward. We are ready to begin lining up participants for this next phase, and start bringing additional partners on in Q2 2023.