Local big data: the role of libraries in building community data infrastructures

Communities face opportunities and challenges in many areas, including education, health and wellness, workforce and economic development, housing, and the environment [21]. At the same time, governments have significant fiscal constraints on their ability to address these challenges and opportunities. Through a combination of open government, open data, and civic engagement, however, governments, citizens, civil society groups, and others are reinventing the relationship between governments and the governed by developing crowdsourced and other innovative solutions for community advancement. Underlying this reinvention and innovation is data -- particularly local data about housing, air quality, graduation rates, literacy rates, poverty, disease, and more. And yet, not all communities have the capacity to create, work with, or leverage data at the local level. Using a case study approach in a medium-sized U.S. city, this paper focuses on the issues that smaller communities face when seeking to create local data infrastructures and the extent to which libraries can develop their capabilities, capacity, and abilities to work with community information and data to facilitate community engagement and high-impact, locally relevant analytics.