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Kate McDowell, "Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact" (ALA, 2025)
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Kate McDowell
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jen Hoyer
Welcome to New Books Network. My name is Jen Hoyer, and today I'm Speaking with Kate McDowell, author of Critical Data Storytelling for Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact, published in 2025 by Ala Neal Schumann. In today's polarized landscape, libraries face two key the difficulty of turning raw data into narratives that advocate for libraries and the ethical complexities of representing communities in these stories. Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries empowers librarians and information professionals to transform data into ethical, compelling narratives. It teaches the practicality of data storytelling and introduces critical approaches that ensure stories are inclusive, socially just, and impactful. And I'm really thrilled today to be joined by author Dr. Kate McDowell, professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Kate, welcome to New Books Network.
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Kate McDowell
Thank you so much. It's really nice to be here with you.
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Jen Hoyer
And before we dive into talking about your book, I would really love if you could introduce yourself to listeners. Maybe if you want to share a bit about your background and the work you've done that's led you to where you are now.
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Kate McDowell
Yeah, absolutely. I will make a long journey short and say that I was a former children's librarian. I came to Illinois as a faculty member, really teaching in the area of youth services, but my specialization was storytelling, which I've taught now for a little over 20 years. So teaching storytelling in the library tradition eventually led me in about 2017, to collaborate with several folks on our faculty who are familiar with very big data sets. Two PhD in astronomy, Matt Turk and Jill Naiman. So they both co developed with me the data storytelling courses for the. We call ourselves the Ischool at Illinois, but the School of Information Sciences. And from there, I began to take some of my. I had started doing consulting work about storytelling, beginning with library organizations. But as you see in the book, I also worked with public health organizations. I don't put as much in the book about the environmental organizations, but I've done advancement fundraising for universities. I've done a lot of consulting work. And so I wanted to write this book to. I feel like I wanted to write this book. I hope I'm not jumping too far ahead in order to bring the insights that I've had as a storyteller and then as someone who's been working in the area of data storytelling back home to my home field of libraries and where I started.
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Jen Hoyer
Fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, that's so many different fields that I can immediately see as you're talking that storytelling is really applicable to. So I guess then turning to this book, I want to talk a little bit more. You hinted already at why you were moved to write a book about critical data storytelling, and you mentioned that you wanted to bring it back to libraries. But I guess I'm curious if you can think of anything that it's really important for libraries and librarians to have this book right now and for people to pick this book up and read it.
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Kate McDowell
Yeah. So I think it's one of the hardest pivots that any profession ever has to make to go from being Pew Research documented the most trusted place in the United States 10 years ago, 11 years ago, to where we are today. I don't think libraries have been prepared for the speed even before this past spring, summer, and where we all are now in the fall of change that has been coming to public discourse around what public institutions are for. So one of my goals was to help empower librarians to get back to our roots. Libraries did not just happen. They happened because of the work. Often women's organizations did this work. My earlier research was about five women who wrote eight reports that were the first empirical evidence collected in the field at a national level. They collected this evidence at a time when women could not speak at American Library association conferences from 1882 to 1898. So when I think about what we're going, I think of us as digging deep. I use that metaphor a Lot like we're digging deeper into our data, we're digging deeper into our history in order to get to this place right now and be able to move forward with libraries being sustained in public and academic contexts where we increasingly see, for example, libraries in academic context referred to as non tuition revenue generating units. Right. It's an interesting framing. I wanted to write a book about storytelling. Having read all kinds of business storytelling books, I've been immersed in those discourses. I wanted to write a book about storytelling for libraries specifically. But really it's applicable to nonprofits which have a very different relationship. Even when we borrow the word customer, and we do, libraries have a very different relationship to their audiences than a purchase consumer relationship. It is much more about trust. It's about buy in. It's about the idea that we are doing something here together about providing information and community spaces and community connections. And that is not. We haven't had to really dig deep into that rhetoric in a while, I would say. So that's why it's really important right now.
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Jen Hoyer
Absolutely. And so then you break down the work of critical data storytelling into chapters on storytelling, on data, on narrative strategy, audience, and misinformation. So starting at the beginning, I want to reflect on your statement in chapter one that data storytelling is a specific kind of information provision that, like all distribution of information, we must view as a political act. Can you break down for listeners what the elements of critical data storytelling are and what it is about this work that makes it political?
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Kate McDowell
Sure. So first of all, you could argue that the power dynamics of who gets the microphone already makes storytelling political in some fundamental sense. But when I think about what critical data storytelling is doing as a title and as what I hope is a field shifting kind of perspective, I'm interested in drawing from traditions that get beyond the current focus on data as a kind of asset. You'll hear data is the new oil, which is a very limited model of what data means. And in fact, I think that that modeling of data as oil that we're going to somehow consume really gets out of what I think nonprofits are here to do, which is to nourish and nurture community relationships. So I like to use the metaphor. So I'm getting to why it's political, but I want to start with why data is important to think of in a certain way. I like to think of the metaphor of a kitchen. We are in librarianship so strong at collection that we forget that our data is not for storage or just for reporting. It is for digging into more Deeply. It is for nourishing our existence.
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Jen Hoyer
Right.
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Kate McDowell
It is something that. So I use it as a. What I point out is that we don't put beans on the shelf to let them go dry and bad in three years. Well, I mean, like some of us do. I've done that. But, you know, we don't. We're not trying to store the food that we eat. We are trying to collect it so we can consume it. And that's a place where I think our Herculean strength and collection can work against us in the library field because we forget that it's not about gathering and putting away for other people to access. Data is ours to make meaning out of. So I also added the concept of critical. And critical comes for me from three places. One is the Frankfurt School theorists who were working post World War II to understand the authoritarian and ultimately fascist and genocidal regimes that were, you know, very nearly world dominant in that time. You know, very close to that. Closer than we, than we like to acknowledge historically, and did a huge amount of damage to many societies and cultures. That is important because I think we have to be sure that we're not taking data and completely abstracting it from the real humans that are represented by it. Because data, when it represents a community, represents exactly the same way as a picture book or a movie or any other representational model, except it has a lot of power because you can speak at scale to certain things. So we don't want to be speaking at scale in ways that amplify biases that would dehumanize fundamentally. That's what I mean by critical. It's also informed by Kimberle Crenshaw's work in critical race theory and by Klein and Dignasio's work data Feminisms. So when I think about critical data storytelling, what I'm really talking about is seeing power and trying to not just attain cultural competence, but actually enact cultural competence by making things better. So I don't do this in the book, but in my own classes. For example, I teach org charts to my first year library and information science students. I teach policies and I have them read things about policies and then rewrite privacy policies, for example, to make them better. I have them get their hands on the idea that they're going to have to not just join an institution, but actively be part of shaping its continued existence and its future. And I often talk about sort of the annual, you know, what. What is political in this context? Well, to boil it really down to the most brass tax level. It Is do you get your budget for this year or not? And what does that budget look like and who has to be persuaded in order to make that happen? And those power structures are very different in public and academic libraries. But there's an overlap in community college libraries that we often don't pay enough attention to, where actually community colleges are local, tax funded. But they also operate like academic libraries in the way that they serve. There's also connections with them in school libraries. So there are a lot of connections between different kinds of librarianship that require critical approaches to be ethical and to get the job done of justifying those budgets, which it's not going to. It's not going to get easier in these few years, I don't think. Yeah, I think we're really into it right now as far as justifying budgets.
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Jen Hoyer
Yeah, yeah. And so your second chapter dives even further into data and you ask, does library data feel like our data? I really felt that question. And one of my takeaways from reading your book is that we can make data ours by choosing what story we want to tell. And you outline a few goals in this chapter that library advocacy data stories might have. Can you share some of those goals with listeners and maybe give one or two examples of how they might result in advocacy data data stories?
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Kate McDowell
Yes. This is such a great question. And I'm thinking about two things. One is, how did I learn that library data didn't feel like our data? So maybe I'll start there and then I'll go on to how they might result, you know, goals, the goals that might result in advocacy data stories. So first I was in Norway on sabbatical, and I had a lovely affiliation with the University of Bergen there at the center. It's called the center for Narratives. Scott and Jill Walker Retberg are incredible leaders at that center. They connected me with the local public library. And we had a session where I gave a talk. And then they had sent me their new data viz package. And it was beautiful. I mean, they had pages of just gorgeous data visualizations. And I said, okay, great, what story do you want to tell? And the room fell silent. No one knew what story they wanted to tell from all of this data. And that was where a person in the workshop spoke up and said, but it doesn't really feel like our data. And I thought, wow, we've got to watch this with data visualization. We've actually got to make sure that we don't keep thinking that the next techno solution is going to get us there and avoid Making our own meaning out of what we're doing. So that really struck me, and I've been thinking ever since, about what kinds of library advocacy data stories do we need? The goals are always based on the kinds of work that the institution itself needs to do at this time. And that's a set of judgment calls. So I don't want to pretend that there's an abstract absolute in this, but we have in the data storytelling toolkit, which is freely available online and still under development. The IMLS grant is not over yet. We're still funded for the moment. I mean, the government shutdown doesn't help, but at the moment, we're still funded. So you can think about goals like, are you. Are you seeking to have your audience understand something that you can tell from the data? So let's say you are understanding the real needs of the community. Let's imagine a very practical, simple survey that you do to figure out what do people need in terms of technology from the library, or even just what do they want? I worked with a library recently that was like, look, we're in an area of Florida with a lot of retired people. They don't need technology. They want somebody else to run their printers, right? Okay, so that still counts, right? So what do people need or want? It doesn't necessarily necessarily have to be about the utter desperation, although it can be. But the data can help you understand the real needs if you think of both what your library is already collecting, who are your users, who are your cardholders, what kind of traffic do you have combined with what's the context of the community, what are the regional data sources that you can look at to say, who are we missing and. Or what are the patterns? Are there trends in the needs that would help us to advocate better for. Let's imagine this technology survey people really don't need. Like, let's imagine you learn that a computer lab in the library is used some, but it's not as utilized as you might think. And in fact, you've got parents and kids asking to borrow, you know, reading materials or laptops or something, digital forms of materials that you haven't invested in very heavily yet. Partly it's expensive, it can be difficult. You know, you're trying to figure out what the needs are. So. So you understand the real needs, you may not be able meet them all, but if you can use the data of what is the community using and what might they need more and use that to advocate for a story that goes to usually some kind of legislative body, right? Or administrative body, either way. And you say, hey, look, we understand that we've got these needs and we've got this plan to meet the needs, and we think it's going to result in these things. You've got a really crisp beginning, middle and end with, we understand the needs. Here's our plan, here's where we want it to go. And. And it also fits with other practices like assessment. I've had people tell me that the toolkit is something they use for assessment as well. So let's imagine just any. So the first story would be any improvement in technology, right? We are going to buy laptops that students can borrow at our front desk for a period of a day at a time when they. Their computers go down. Right? Like something like that would be a very classic academic library. And I think for a public library, we are going to upgrade our printers. That is a. That is a frequent need, right? Like that's. We're going to upgrade our printers. Yes. It's expensive. The networking on printing is hard. My heart really goes out to all my IT buddies who are constantly struggling on that printing. It's like a Sisyphean task. And it's really important we know there are real needs for people with printing. Right. Like those things at a broader level. So if you think about what's a data advocacy story, I think the one a lot of people miss is building on strengths. So let's imagine that you, at some point in the life of your library, got a grant to do a STEM or STEAM interactive display of some kind. Something physical and technological and interactive, and nobody else in your whole region has that. That would be an interesting place to think about. Is it really that you want everybody to have all the same resources, or are you at a point where you could build on strengths and create a distinctive identity? So that story is now at the level not just of justifying one thing, but at the level of the library. We are an institution that helps with innovative forms of education in order to help our communities develop, you know, talent of young people as they come along through this organization. So the story still has kind of a beginning, middle and end, but it's more of a story about we can build on the strength to do something better. I think it's important to insert those in because I'll do a third story example, if you don't mind. So it's important to insert those kind of building on strengths in some place because a lot of people, when they think about goals of data storytelling, they just think about addressing Deficits. Once you measure something, you measure the gap between what is and what you hope it would be, and you start addressing deficits. And the problem with that is, and any leader will know this, the problem with that is that you've got to find a way to get beyond always being in need. I remember an organization. I've done a hundred interviews before I even started the most recent project and the most recent book. It's been over 10 years of doing interviews. I remember one distinctly with an arts organization where they said, we've come with hat in hand. We've been asking for money for so long and suddenly we got it and now we don't even know what our story is anymore. We've lost track. So you can't only build the addressing deficit story because if you get your needs met, there's no further place for that story to go. Right? Like we have this need. If it is met, there needs to be a vision for what's next. And that's hard because it takes digging deeper, right? Like, that's the metaphor I use a lot. So, yeah, I think this is really the kind of work I think about when I think about advocacy data stories.
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Kate McDowell
Definitely.
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Jen Hoyer
Yeah. And you really emphasize the role of story building and creating a narrative experience in your third chapter. And so I'd love if you could share what some of the narrative forms are that are available to us when we're doing data storytelling. And why does using an existing narrative form make a difference for our audience and for the impact that we can have?
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Kate McDowell
This is such an important question. What I know is that human brains are very good at narrative, but they're not good at all the narratives at once. They kind of need one story to focus on. And I like to say, you know, one story can do one story's worth of work. That's the amount that it can do. So when I think about narrative experience, I mean, the best way for me to do this, of course, is to tell a story. And I want to tell you kind of one of the places where the book began for me, which was my own experience as a children's librarian during a library renovation project where we had the entire staff team sitting around the table with all the proposed blueprints from the architects. We had the old building and the new building, and we'd been really studying these and trying to make sense of them. And we had a massive problem, which was we had this built in concrete 70s waffle ceiling with the can lights, like one per square where you could barely see. You know, you can get a book under there and maybe get to read it, but it's very. It takes some. Takes some work. And as we're sitting here staring at this, something remarkable happened. So, you know, we knew we wanted the new space to be light and airy, but with this concrete ceiling, we just didn't have the space to do that. We were going to cover it over, but if we did that, then the ceilings weren't. We're going to be like, you know, 7ft high, which is okay for most people, but it's really not Great if you're 65 to have the ceiling be, you know, a little above your head. So one of my colleagues looked at us and looked at the data and said this brilliant thing. She said, what if we dig the basement down deeper? What if we dig the floor down deeper? And I thought, wow, that's incredible. That insight is based on the data that we had. Not because it was in the data, but because it was what was not in the data. Right. So when I think about data storytelling, I also think about the data outlines what seems to be given as the parameters. But then humans will come up with solutions, some of which no AI could ever come up with, because they don't actually know the physicality of space. Right. They know the large language models know the average output of different kinds of words and places. Well, I haven't ever heard of a library that dug the basement down deeper.
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Jen Hoyer
Right.
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Kate McDowell
It was a genuinely creative approach. So when I think about that story, of course I think about the experience of living it, but I also think about the experience of getting to tell it to audiences who I know are thinking about it after I leave, because it speaks to something about there being potential for solutions, even when we seem constrained by an impossible set or amount or context of data. And so part of what I think about as well is, you know, how do we make these narrative forms accessible? Okay, so that story really was one about discovery, right? We had all the data in front of us, and the discovery we needed was not in the data. It was around the context of the physicality of the building. Discovery narratives are really interesting. They involve giving the audience an experience of coming to the same data that you are seeing in some way and then showing them where you think there might be a path through. They are really good when you're working with boards or groups, administrative groups, for trying to get on the same page about how to approach a solution to think about. Can we form a story in such a way that we can see the same outcome from this based on the data that we have? Maybe not always in the data, but based on the data that we have. The other two, I like to emphasize are continuity and transformation. And I'll talk about continuity next because it is the hidden, implicit story of every public organization that has survived from its founding to this date. It is the hidden, implicit story of every private organization that has sustained a commitment to education. It is a really important kind of story. It's not without conflict. Continuity isn't a story about everything staying the same. Continuity is a story about how you weathered the conflict and what lasted. So the one that's been told many times by many libraries these last few years is during the pandemic, we had an incredible shift in how we did our work. Everything stopped for some people. For other people, the anxiety was overwhelming. For other people, you had sudden, sudden changes in needing to provide services. And I was lucky to be part of a network of public library directors at that time, hearing in live time how they were solving some of these problems. And so I knew when it started running through the networks of people, friends were telling me, oh, we're going to provide pickup service outside. We're just going to move the hold shelves into the foyer and then, you know, take things to the curb, do the curbside thing, do that parking lot work. So the story there is not, hey, look at us. Parking lots are the best place for us to do our services, right? The story there is, we're going to persist anyhow. We're going to make it through this. We're going to adjust as needed. And I would say another interesting story I would call a continuity story, although, and it's a hard one for our field, is that usage patterns have changed since the pandemic and there is more online usage and there is less physical usage. In every library study that I've seen across the entire world, there's a massive UK study out from 2023 on. So what that means is we are continuing in a different way. But when you tell the narrative as a continuity story, rather than always emphasizing transformation, you can get buy in from people who are really interested in stability, they're really interested in resilience. They're interested in the feeling of the story being we're still here for you, which is a very different feeling. So discovery on the one hand, like, wow, what can we figure out here? This is really interesting continuity. We are still here for you. We are resilient. And the third type is transformation. And these all come from literary theories as well as from my own experience. So transformation people will recognize as the hero's journey. And it is a great story to tell about the people that libraries serve. But when we try to tell it about ourselves and we do it a lot, we end up seeming kind of self promoting or self aggrandizing in ways that don't fit with how people trust libraries. So we have to be really careful about not misapplying certain story structures to the work that we have to do. So, you know, why is that? Well, the transformation story is built on Joseph Campbell's work. And Joseph Campbell was studying the narratives of the life stories of the heroes, right? So heroes being great figures of major religions, sacred people. We're talking about Jesus and Buddha and Muhammad, and we are not them. No offense to us, we're fantastic. But we're not all that level of hero, and our libraries aren't either. So we have to really think about, can we tell a transformation story? And I'll give you an example. I talked with a community college librarian who had a family that was two parents, both in community college, struggling to make it. Not much family support beyond the two of them. And they had two children with no place to go on weekends when they really needed to be studying. Everybody kind of needed to be studying. And this community college library did something they'd never done before. And they set up a very small children's area for homework for these two kids. And, and I think about that, it's like, wow, what kind of lifetime transformation does it give a family when a library makes the flexibility for just two people to earn one degree beyond high school level? Well, if you look at the data, you'll see that there's an average 85% higher level of learning by completing even just one degree beyond high school? So we talk all the time about being lifelong learning supporters, but have we thought about making a pitch for lifelong earning as part of what we do? Because we are transforming lives by our resources, by being flexible in our provisions. But we need some stories that help show that to people and that connect those stories. It's not enough to say these two right what's better is to say these two were really positively affected and these two kids had a place to study and this family of four is making it through this because this community college library was flexible. It's even better to say these people could be many of us and these people could have an experience that a lot of people might have. If we keep our eyes open for places where needs might emerge that we aren't expecting and maybe don't traditionally think of as within our purview, that's not to say that we can always solve every need. I don't want to imply that, but I think this particular community college library did a great job of being flexible, and I think it's a beautiful example of a transformation story because they're transforming lives.
- [29:45]
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Kate McDowell
So good, so good, so good.
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Jen Hoyer
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Kate McDowell
I get an extra 5% off with.
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Jen Hoyer
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Jen Hoyer
And I guess you know, thinking about the impact that narratives have on audiences, you really emphasize the relationship between storytelling and audience and you focus on audience more. In chapter four, can you give some examples of some of the dynamics that impact how audiences receive a story and how we should keep those in mind when we're crafting narratives with our data?
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Kate McDowell
Yeah, I'd be happy to, and it's an interesting set of questions for me. I think of storytelling as a triangle and so the three points on the triangle are the storyteller, the audience, and the story itself. And the story in that sense is an emergent property of the interaction between the teller and the audience. I always think that an ideal interaction between teller and audience is not only one way, but actually could flip so that at some times the teller, often the library, pauses to ask questions. Survey have focus groups otherwise engage the audience, their students or public or whoever they're serving. And that relationship, having some flexibility in that relationship, can lead to a more nuanced and informed story emerging. So that's one reason why it's important to me to think about audience. Another thing about audience is that audiences have different. They come with different things. Right? And we live in a world where people will tell you all the time, you should know your audience. And that's.
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Jen Hoyer
That's great.
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Kate McDowell
But I feel like nobody really says how. And in this book I talk about how I really say, this is what you do to know your audience. You get into understanding things about what they know. So what is their knowledge? Let's imagine you've got a public library board and there's some tension on that board. You need to know what they know about organizational context for the library. What are they assuming as they come in? Where do they need maybe some updated information? You need to know their knowledge. You also need to know something about the demographics of the people that you're serving. Now, you have to be careful with demographics because demographics are not knowledge. The only kind of demographic count that really gives you information at the knowledge level might be languages spoken in the household. And that's a higher level of knowledge if there are more languages. Right. So it's not to say that these are the same things, but it's really helpful to know demographics because communities change, especially in the United States. We have a lot of shifts. It's who we've always been. I hope we'll continue to be a place that has periodic shifts in demographics and lots of amazing, strong. There have been always incredible state level programs to help people get set up in the United States as their home. And audiences also have attitudes. And this, I think, is where we are up against some real challenges these days. So I think a lot about the way how do you know your audience, its knowledge, its demographics, its attitudes, Those three things are kind of fundamental to this process. What I think is important to think about is let's imagine that you're crafting a data story about expanding your services for job seekers. That would be a possibility. And this is a public library thing that's really common, but we don't always focus on it. It's like a side benefit of what's happening. And I think it's one of the things we need to center as one of the public library stories these days is helping with job seeking. And I see libraries doing that more than they were a few years ago, which is really nice to. So if we're crafting a narrative with library data about our computer use, right in house computer use, filling out forms, those kinds of approaches, knowing that it's very hard to apply for jobs on a phone, forms are not made to be filled out on a phone. So we really need some computer support there, technological support to help people do that. So the thing to think about there is when we think about our audiences for that story, maybe there are multiple audiences, we want to be able to talk to the executives who can make the decision. And that's one kind of description of what is going on. We also need to be able to talk to the community that's funding the library about why this is important and what this could do for people. We also want to be sure that that same story works for the audience of people who got a job at the library and doesn't make them feel alienated or in some other way. Like, this is like, you don't want people to feel negatively, exceptional ever. Right. Like, that's really it. That's not what it's about. We're trying to make sure that the audience is with us in the telling of the story. So when crafting narratives with library data, part of our job is to try to make sure that we have a story that's powerful enough, but that also could be told not just by us, but retold by other people in ways that would still support the library. And that can be tricky. That can be kind of difficult. I think it's most difficult when you've got audiences that are. So another feature of audiences is the attitudes. Right. I mentioned attitudes. And attitudes can be a lot of different things. These days, we have more attitudes than we've had in the past. Because usually library boards or groups overseeing boards of trustees at university levels or college levels would be popped positive or negative or mixed or indifferent to particular proposals. And so each of those requires a different kind of strategy. Well, now we have some boards where the boards are actually divided. And sometimes. So when I talk about what's political about this, I don't say this in the book, but I went to New College of Florida, which was the model for turning a public liberal arts university into a private, privately organized Christian athletics college. Right. It's got a huge influx of private funds bolstering it up right now. I don't know if it's going to be profitable in this model. It isn't yet. But if you look at what the governor of Florida did, he stacked the higher board of higher education not just like a few people, but took a six member board and added seven people to it, some of them not even from the state. So there are divided audiences, and those divided audiences don't share the same reality. And when audiences don't even share the same reality, there may not be space for middle ground. When you are actively being dehumanized as a person who works in an industry like librarianship and libraries, if you are actively being dehumanized for doing the work that all of our professional ethics and standards. And by the way, not just ours, but look at ases, the association for Information Science and Technology. Look at ieee, look at any information organization and its ethics statements for professionals. ALA is not an exceptional organization in this way. Right. We are. We humanize people as part of the ethics of our professions. So we have to make sure that we don't take the bait when people are trying to use debate in order to derail an argument altogether. This is new. This is not something most libraries have had to face. It takes fortitude and stamina. It comes up around book banning, of course, but it also comes up around just incremental defunding, deliberate incremental defunding of libraries as places. So the data of what we are doing and the impact we are having is absolutely crucial to helping an audience connect with our story. And even if they can't all connect with it, it's absolutely crucial that we don't allow our stories to be driven by people who are trying to dehumanize the work we do or the people we serve. It is so easy to repeat back. I saw this happen when I worked with the World health organization in 2021 on pandemic issues. I got brought in as a storyteller on and pandemic issues because there was all this. We called it the infodemic, right? There was all this toxic information out there along. It's not bad enough people are sick from this horrible virus, right? But then you've got all this misinformation just flying so fast. And we learned, MIT study found, MIT Media Lab found that fake news was traveling faster than real news. And I could comment more on our times now, but for the moment, I'LL just say, what I know for sure is that we have to keep in mind that not all statements of, well, you librarians are all a bunch of insert terrible word here are worth countering with. No, we're not insert terrible word here. Don't repeat their language. Don't give them that power. Why would we hand over our description, our definition of selves, to people who are actively trying to destroy the organizations and the purposes that we have? So this is new, and we have to. To armor up in a different way. It's a new kind of fight with those polarized and divided audiences.
- [40:02]
Jen Hoyer
Absolutely. Well, and we've touched on misinformation. Your final chapter is titled Storytelling Against Library Misinformation. It feels really timely. I don't know if you have one or two other examples that maybe you can share about how library misinformation is spread through storytelling and then suggest more strategies and tactics we can use for counter storytelling.
- [40:25]
Kate McDowell
Yeah, it's such an interesting set of questions that you ask. And what I would say is that we're going to be busy for a while doing some of this work at a speed and scale that we didn't necessarily expect to be doing. I'm just pulling up the slides from my very last talk to be able to kind of support my answer here. But I'm there now. So when I think about library misinformation, like to start with a story of something that happened 20 years ago, because, yeah, it's new what we're facing. But, you know, think about the women who founded the first empirical evidence gathering, and all of you services and librarianship, they couldn't even speak at conferences. So it's not like it's the first time in history that people have overcome ridiculously difficult barriers.
- [41:11]
Various Commercial Ad Narrators
Right.
- [41:12]
Kate McDowell
Like, ridiculously difficult barriers are part of what we do. And that's okay. Like, that's. That's a good thing. So when I think about the library misinformation, I like to go back 20 years ago to this experience that was shared with me of a library that was in the process of an expansion. And the mayor of the town decided that there would not be a library expansion at the level that the board had agreed, and he would instead change the numbers and have the library board secretly vote on numbers that he had determined by himself. And he told the library director, director figured this out. And the library director was told, if you tell anybody, I'm going to fire you. So deliberate disinformation on the part of a mayor trying to get the library to be smaller, so he didn't have to pay as much money for it. Right. It's not new. It's happened before, it will happen again. It's not new. So when I think about what happened there, you know, there was a disinformation campaign by the mayor that turned into an enforced misinformation campaign that the library director was told, you do this or you lose your job. And fortunately, there was talk in the administrative offices among trusted people who could get word out to the city council who was going to be doing the final vote on this expansion. And it all got pushed back down the pipeline, and that mayor was not reelected. So, you know, library misinformation can, if that happens, if somebody is threatening people behind closed doors about how the data is represented, about a library that's real and that. So tactics include, you've got to figure out who. Who are your people. So I like to think about drawing from Timothy Snyder's book on tyranny. I like to think about lessons for libraries. I'll just give two. One is, remember professional ethics. So you can be in a horrible situation and everything can be going wrong, and misinformation feels completely overwhelming. And we have to remember that's by design. The overwhelm is intentional. So remembering our professional ethics and in showing up, I talked to a local politician who's a good friend of mine just this week showing up with the attitude of, well, this meeting is rough, but if anybody wants to have a cup of tea and talk about it afterwards, I'd be happy to do that. That is not incidental. That is not just being nice. It is a strategic move. It can be a strategic move to think about the professional ethics that involve making sure that information organizations can reach their audiences, even when their audiences look like they're about to te down right. This is complicated, but it's possible. So if we remember that we are here to humanize, we are here because we want to serve people. We are here for the purposes of protecting freedom of information and the democratic ideals that symbolizes and represents. That's the foundation of library professional ethics. That's really where we're from. It's not controversial. I don't think buying into the controversy actually helps us very much that if we treat it ourselves as controversial, what we do is lose our stance, and then we're on the slippery ground that keeps going. So I think we have to defend institutions. And I sort of alluded to this earlier. But another thing that is functional, especially at all power comes down to people in a room making a decision. I don't care if it's a real room or a zoom room, but somebody's voting in some way at every organization or listening to a leader, whichever it is. But it comes down to a room of people making a decision. So we also need to make eye contact, small talk, not just among library organizations, like among libraries with the librarians and the people we serve and all of our colleagues and peers. And we also need to make eye contact in small talk in those rooms of power where things look like they're about to go wrong, because we have to preserve the possibility of fixing it later. And I think we have to be really compassionate with each other right now. Because when I think about the things that libraries are going through, like threats of defunding over a single display, for example, which has happened multiple times in many places, the compromises that need to be made to make sure that the library isn't defunded in its entirety are. Are a matter of looking toward continuity. I would love to be the hero of this story that makes sure the library can survive. But the reality sometimes is if we serve the continuity and make sure that we have this library in 10 years, that might be a better strategic move long term. So I think we're going to have to be kind to each other because right now it's very different in different states. I just got back from Florida, my parents and brother there. I was working with some folks there and their experience, as opposed to where I'm living now in Illinois. Very different kinds of library justification narratives, very different kinds of strategies. So in my mind, the counter storytelling moves are evidence of impact. So that's their. For their content is evidence of impact. When I think about their tone, and we have a whole chart of tone and tactics around audience attitudes that you can see in the book and on the website. I think the tone part is important because you have to make determinations about when to keep working on persuasion, hopefully for the majority of stakeholders. If you can get a fair shake at representation, which not every place can, but you have to determine when to persuade and then also when to avoid debate. Because it might be stronger and better as a counter storytelling move to say, I hear you, we are this, I hear you. You, we do this, I hear you, we have this impact. And you don't actually have to engage with every person who comes at you with attacks or even questions or undermining or uncertainty. You can just say, I hear you. But I'm confident in this evidence. Right? This evidence speaks in ways that we can talk about what else it could mean, but I'm confident the evidence is right and the meaning that we have made of it is this. Here's our interpretation. So there are rhetorical moves that are really needed. And story to me is endlessly fascinating because it combines information and emotion together. And that's where our power lies. That's where we are able to make change through storytelling. So yeah, right now there's a lot of needing to determine what the problem is in different locales and then determining what to do and when to focus on persuasion and when to avoid debate. And visiting back with our professional ethics and remembering how closely aligned they are with other information profession organizations will only strengthen our ability to stay on message. Not because we're trying to engage in combat, but because we're trying to serve communities. That's really it. Absolutely. Yeah.
- [48:16]
Jen Hoyer
That is. That is empowering. Well, I've taken a lot of your time, but before we wrap up our conversation, I want to give you a chance to share what you're working on next. I don't know if you have more that you're still doing that you'd like to talk about related to critical data storytelling or other totally different projects that you're returning to right now.
- [48:34]
Kate McDowell
No. Thank you so much. So I still want to do an article about how we developed the data storytelling toolkit for libraries because it was a really fascinating project. It involved 100 librarians taking real time with it us in two forms. The first was a year long core design team and we'd love to be able to repeat that. Right now I think folks are too challenged on the ground to participate in national grant core design teams. So we're working on how to strategize that. But we had a lot of direct input from librarians go into the toolkit. And that is a lot of the book is not only the toolkit, the book is much more. But that is part of what I'm writing about in the book is this project. So. So I want to get that article done for sure to help other researchers think about how you can use qualitative research approaches to build toolkits that would help maybe other professions with narrative and how narrative needs to move through those spaces. At some point I'm going to write another book and I'm still working on what exactly that's going to be called. I've been thinking about the concept of narrating data as something very different than visualizing data. And I'm interested in how research and other kinds of factual Evidence is and isn't traveling beyond the scope of academia right now. I'm curious about how. I think storytelling might have some important things to say about what? Especially the library storytelling tradition, which is not the business model. Right. It's not about getting people positioned to be our customers. The people who are there are the people who are there, whether they came to your college or live in your community. That's who's there. That's actually not negotiable. You can't look for more different customers. You have to work with the people you have. And so I think that in itself would be an interesting model to start thinking about when we think about research translation out into the world. I did an invited conference panel at ASIST a couple years ago about research translation. And then I gave a webinar for Taylor and Francis. I think it's the largest attended webinar I've ever done that they had 2000 people sign up and like 1200 people come. And this is probably a good time for me to pitch not just the book. Right. Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries and encourage people to go out and find it and read it. There's also a YouTube. On YouTube, there's the official webinar of record that ALA Editions and Neil Schuman hosted. And so in that talk also, there are some resources if folks want to know kind of how. How I represented the book initially, that would be it. But, yeah, my goal is to keep working on storytelling now. It's what I've done more than half my life. And it's such a joy to get to do this work. So, yeah, thank you so much for that opportunity to talk about what's next. So stay tuned. The book now, the webinar that's out there, the toolkits out there. To be honest, I also just got promoted to full professor, and I'm so grateful for that and for the support of my school. And I am going to take I've given list. See, I've given over 40 talks in three years, all of them invited. I've given. By the end of this semester, I will have given 15 talks. I'm going to take a little pause in the spring and just refresh. So some of these questions you ask me are so wonderful and they're even healthy. And I think we all should be thinking about what's next, because sometimes what's next is the part where you refresh and like, say, okay, how will I get the energy to do what I know is important next? So I want to do some important things next about research translation, but I'm going to be pausing to go internal a little bit on that, like I think all good storytellers do sometimes.
- [52:10]
Jen Hoyer
Yeah, both very, very important. Well, thank you so, so much for chatting with me once again today, I've been Speaking with Kate McDowell, author of Critical Data Storytelling for Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and impact, published in 2025 by Ala Neal Schumann. My name is Jen Hoyer, and you're listening to New Books Now.
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Various Commercial Ad Narrators
It.