PDA Event: Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries

How can your library use data stories not just to survive, but to thrive? In this interactive session, Dr. Kate McDowell introduces key ideas from her forthcoming book Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries (ALA Editions, 2025), designed to help all library workers—whether data experts or story experts—craft ethical, evidence-based narratives for advocacy and impact. Participants will learn how to:

• Reach diverse audiences with stories that inform persuasively
• Leverage classic and emerging narrative structures for true stories that connect emotionally
• Increase the resilience of libraries through mindful approaches to conflict 

Based on McDowell’s 30 years of library work and national consulting, this session shares insights from the IMLS-funded Data Storytelling Toolkit for Libraries. In an era of rising censorship and shrinking budgets, critical data storytelling offers a powerful response—one that supports library workers from the smallest rural branches to the largest academic institutions. This session is for anyone who wants to use data to tell the story of why libraries matter—truthfully, powerfully, and strategically.

Presenter: 

Dr. Kate McDowell’s interdisciplinary work examines how storytelling plays a vital role in humanizing data analysis and communication. She focuses on storytelling as information research and how the history of library storytelling informs data storytelling. Her article “Storytelling Wisdom: Story, information, and DIKW” theorizes storytelling as a fundamental information form. She leads the nationally-funded Data Storytelling Toolkit for Librarians project to equip libraries with narrative tools for data-informed advocacy, which has been used by over 1,000 librarians in over 50 countries so far. As of 2024, she had delivered over a dozen keynotes on her work to nonprofit organizations nationally and internationally and many more informal talks at for state and regional organizations. She won the ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 2022, and her book Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact is coming out in August 2025.  

Register to attend.

Hosted by CARLI