The Need for Storytelling in Librarianship

Data storytelling as a means for advocacy, social justice, and inclusion in libraries

Posted on February 4, 2026 in Blog Posts

You might recall Dr. Kate McDowell from an interview we ran about her project, Data Storytelling Toolkit for Libraries, an actionable set of tools and advice for libraries to transform the data they already collect into advocacy. Recently, Dr. McDowell published her research into a guidebook from ALA Editions, Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries: Crafting Ethical Narratives for Advocacy and Impact, covering strategies for compelling storytelling, approaches to integrating social justice and inclusion into these stories, and tactics for maintaining open communication with communities during times of polarization and social rifts.

We are excited to share the following excerpt from Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries, used with permission from the American Library Association, with you.

📘 Learn more about and purchase a copy of Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries

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At a recent storytelling workshop, someone approached me to ask for help. She told me that she didn’t really have any stories. It was in the fall, so I asked, “What happened this summer?” She said there was a big renovation project at her library: a massive overhaul of how the collection was organized, the staffing that handled shelving, and even the shelves themselves. I asked a bit more about why and how it had happened, and it turned out there had been a successful fundraising campaign, showing overwhelming support for the public library in these times since the pandemic. A wave of new donations had paid for new infrastructure, and equally importantly, had supported administrative time and focus to really design and implement major changes. I said, “You mean that donations let you change how your library works for the community?” “Yes,” she said. “But is that really a story?”

Yes, that is really a story. In fact, it’s an amazing story, and it’s also the kind of story that happens every day, all the time when citizens get together to support their local public library.

Storytelling has a history in librarianship that stretches back over 130 years as a live, oral, interpretive art that has been a crucial practice in library services to young people (Alvey 1974). This tradition emphasizes the relationship between teller and audience and respect for the story and its source (Hearne 1993). Such a relationship occurs in the moment of storytelling, establishing trust and goodwill between librarians and those who come to the library to hear stories told and find favorite narratives (Del Negro 2017). There is tremendous potential for librarians to mobilize what they know from captivating audiences of children, parents, and caregivers week after week, year after year, to support the libraries themselves.

The gap in creating meaningful and effective data storytelling for libraries is twofold.

First, most people treat work stories as ephemeral, passed around inside the organization informally, without ways of capturing those stories for outside audiences as well. The stories we tell about the power of libraries, for example, should be told and retold over time, with the input of attentive audiences, so that they become memorable and highly retellable. Stories about any information organization can start organically, as informal moments of sharing—consider coworkers talking about a surprisingly high attendance at an event or an unusual percentage increase in service usage. Informal conversations about what professionals learn tend to be ephemeral, with only reports capturing this data for larger audiences. However, these stories can have greater impact when they are captured and crafted with the kind of compelling supporting evidence that only data storytelling can provide. This will involve a careful consideration of issues such as whether to use raw attendance/usage number increases or the percentage of people impacted in a community. With so many competing pressures for time and attention, many professionals tend to frame data-gathering for reports as one-time events, with one set of “snapshot” findings to describe. The idea of a longer-term organizational story challenges us to interweave data collection and reporting with broader data storytelling. Structuring information in story form makes data easier to remember, along with its context and meaning. The best stories are told many times to audience after audience, honing their form into something that is easy to remember and share. The data we collect about our libraries deserves attentive reflection, which is part of critical data storytelling. Considering our data through a storytelling lens has great potential to take ephemeral stories and make them memorable and meaningful to larger audiences.

Second, it is difficult to think in terms of stories. We are all storytellers, but it is not always easy to translate data into a story. Librarians bring a deep love of story and outstanding abilities to make others’ stories come alive, as in storytimes. However, it can be difficult to translate that joy and skill into meaningful ways of conceptualizing data storytelling. Even though librarians are typically incredible readers who consume and talk about stories constantly, it requires a new conceptual frame to look at the stories they know and enjoy for their potential as a resource for narrative strategies. This book builds on the skills of effective librarianship so that librarians can take ephemeral data presentations or reports and make them memorable and meaningful to larger audiences. When organizations collect, analyze, and store data, do they create compelling stories about what is learned over time? The evidence we have—what we do, who we are, whose lives libraries change—is the basis of our most important stories. Surveys that are repeated lend themselves to stories of institutional continuity or transformation, and librarians can leverage diligent data collection alongside the 130-year history of library storytelling to communicate information and emotion, to interweave the two and extend our passion for family literacy to a passion for public data literacy. If the data, the information synthesized from data, and the prior stories told about that data are accessible, then, as time moves on, new storytellers in new roles can tell stories about institutional continuity or transformation. Data storytelling might become the most important part of an organization’s historical record for advocacy.

These two issues—story ephemerality and the challenge of thinking in story—are sometimes delegated to communications professionals. A library might have a marketing department (or one person) that knows and does marketing effectively. However, marketing professionals are customer- and community-facing, but not always stakeholder-facing. For example, marketers are not in the business of convincing library boards to vote in support of a proposed change to policy, budget, or services. Librarian expertise is needed to support this kind of change-making, through persuasion and lobbying—they might argue, for example, to modify policies to provide more flexibility in collections and materials loan periods or renewals in the face of long-lasting changes after a pandemic.

Even when marketing can help, the availability of dedicated staff in libraries is extremely uneven and is rarely aligned with the growing economic inequities that impact communities across the United States. While marketing can be valuable, and there will be some marketing professionals who are exceptional individuals, marketing is not designed to go deep enough to communicate the library’s mission to those who have the power to fund or defund organizations. Library leaders must be effective data storytellers.

Data storytelling for community advocacy and social justice has an important history and much future potential in librarianship, but there can be real challenges with this work. There are nuances of communicating powerfully about social injustices while also respectfully representing communities that would benefit the most from greater social justice. To do data storytelling well means to engage with issues of equity and avoid the common pitfall of overgeneralizing about people based on data so that we reproduce stereotypes. Along with data storytelling, we must also engage critical approaches and introduce critical storytelling. Data can dehumanize people, especially when full and rich lives are represented only as numbers (Slovic 2007). This book is about exploring the storytelling heart and transforming it for everyday library advocacy, offering guidance to librarians who want to tell impactful library data stories but don’t know where to start.

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📘 Learn more about and purchase a copy of Critical Data Storytelling for Libraries

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