Leveling Up Our Mapping Tools

Introducing the 2025 PLB Expansion Pack!

After two years (it’s been two years already?!) of Public Library Blueprints (PLB) posts, we at Library Research Service (LRS) wanted to make sure this blog is serving the library community to its full potential. So, just as you might expect from a research service, we ran a survey! Thank you to everyone who filled out this survey on LibWizard, and if you haven’t already, we’d still love to hear from you! 

Survey responses revealed a variety of different topics of interest including but not limited to: mapping data, statistical tools, new resources, research best practices, guidance for data-driven decision making, improving access to data, linking internal and external data, and continuing the current PLB series. With all the great feedback and new ideas, we’ve got a lot to cover in 2025. To tackle these topics, we’ll continue the Public Library Blueprints while incorporating new content from different platforms, and we’ll feature projects by team members from LRS and the entire Colorado State Library where data-driven decision making was key.

Where to Begin

Respondents to the 2025 Library Research Service Blog Feedback Survey selected “Mapping data: CO demographics, socioeconomic data and more by location” as a topic of interest more often than any other topic listed. As it happens, LRS recently purchased a license for the software PolicyMap to bring community insights to libraries by mapping out relevant, location-specific data. To introduce this new-to-LRS tool, let’s take a look at one of the first maps created by LRS, which is a public map of all the Colorado library locations…

Continue reading this post on LRS.org and check out more posts on research in a library context from Library Research Service.

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