An Overview of What’s Overdue

The Public Library Annual Report (PLAR) data is packed with the potential to help inform all sorts of decision making in libraries. In this blog series, The Public Library Blueprints, I’m searching for the most meaningful pieces of data to demonstrate data analysis and visualization techniques. With that in mind, this post’s topic of discussion is overdue fines – a topic that library staff may find themselves needing to present data on if they are working to eliminate fines at their library.

In 2019, the PLAR survey began asking libraries whether overdue fines were being charged for children’s, young adult (YA), or adult books. We now have three years of data on overdue fines in Colorado public libraries which shows a definitive trend toward eliminating fines. We will take a look at several different visualizations of this data to see which methods communicate meaning effectively (and which don’t work at all)…

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