Creating an Infographic based on Library Data

Create & Construct by lorraine santana

Fortunately, information professionals are nothing if not fiends for statistics!

One of my favourite Japanese proverbs Yoki funbetsu wa setchin de deru translates as something along the lines of "Inspiration strikes when on the toilet." I guess this is because it's one place free of distractions - and also frustratingly, the means of recording your ideas. Not surprisingly enough, it was while standing in the shower one day that I decided to put together an infographic about our Library. And while I thought it was a good idea, I had no clue where to start. I'm a Librarian, not a Graphic Designer! But I took my idea, and over the course of a day tried to see if this experiment would work out.

I started by gathering the information that I wanted to include. Fortunately, information professionals are nothing if not fiends for statistics! So I was able to gather up the numbers needs for information on queries and digital literacy instruction almost straight away. Our campus Librarian was able to give me the collection figures with a snap of her fingers and I generated a report using our LMS to get this year's circulation statistics. I originally wanted in include the number of subscription-based journal articles and ebooks viewed/downloaded but at the moment I don't have a reliable way to measure this. Hopefully that will change in the near future, as I would be super interested to what the actual usage on online subscription content is!

I have tried to find official information about our staff and student numbers internally, but I've been largely unsuccessful in the past. However, I stumbled on this Freedom of Information request, which contained exactly the information on staff and student numbers that I needed. After gathering all the information together, all I needed to do now was make it visually appealing!

There are a couple of infographic tools available online that can be used for free, such as Canva, Piktochart, infogr.am,  and Venngage. However I felt wary of using these as they were untried (by me at least), this was an experiment and I didn't want to invest much in the way of time, and because I had a particular visual style in mind. Luckily, our work computers come with the full Adobe Creative Suite installed. I have some experience using Adobe InDesign, but in the end, settled on cooking the whole thing up in Adobe Photoshop. I used the College colours and font, which I was able to find in an old Style Guide. Making the images to go with the text was actually easier than I thought it would be, and I found the cursor images for free online. The most complicated part was surprisingly, the pie chart of circulation information! I think in the end it was a copy/paste job from excel, which is totally embarrassing.

And that was it!

What do you think? Have you ever created an infographic?