Data for Good YYZ: Canadian Urban Libraries Council DataThon

About CULC
The Canadian Urban Libraries Council / Conseil des Bibliothèques Urbaines du Canada (CULC/CBUC) is a non-profit organization representing Canada's largest urban public library systems. Its mission is to strengthen and advocate for Canada's urban libraries, which are essential spaces for community building and knowledge sharing. To further this mission, CULC conducts research to gain insights into evolving library trends, identify best practices, and bolster the impact of urban libraries on their communities.

The Project
The CULC is currently working to build a database of innovation in Canadian libraries. Innovations can include products, services, processes, organization, or communication which are new to the library workplace (but may be in use elsewhere) or were invented by the library staff. To collect this data, CULC is designing a survey to be distributed to libraries across Canada.

The CULC needs the help of Data for Good Toronto volunteers with the following:

• Optimizing survey questions/design for clarity, conciseness, and ease of analysis and validation
• Propose additional survey questions.
• Identify the best survey platform for data collection and survey distribution (ex. Google Forms, Qualtrics, Survey Monkey).
• Suggest platforms/tools to generate automated reports and visualizations of collected survey data.

The DataThon
This DataThon will be held virtually on August Friday 18th 6:00 - 8:00 PM. The CULC will provide registered volunteers with a copy of their survey and give a presentation outlining their goals for the library innovation database. After this, volunteers will work in teams to brainstorm solutions to meet the CULC's goals.