Weed Your Budget

Visualizing an Academic Library’s Financial Position

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5860/ital.v44i1.17373

Keywords:

budgeting, finance, data visualization

Abstract

This paper presents a case study about opportunities for libraries to elevate reporting on their organization's financial status, transactions, and available funds using data visualization, specifically with Power BI, based on work at University of Oregon Libraries. The Power BI dashboard aggregates data from the university’s financial system and integrated library system to provide a consolidated view, and to tell the library's story in a more engaging way. The author proposes using this type of business intelligence technology to provide a transformative impact on financial operations of libraries.

Author Biography

Lydia Harlan, University of Oregon Libraries

Lydia Harlan is the Budget Analyst for Collections, Discovery, and Digital Strategy at University of Oregon Libraries. A librarian by training and budget analyst by circumstance, she holds an MLIS from San Jose State University and a BA in film from Emerson College.

References

John W. Tukey, Exploratory Data Analysis (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1977).

Downloads

Published

2025-03-17

How to Cite

Harlan, L. (2025). Weed Your Budget: Visualizing an Academic Library’s Financial Position. Information Technology and Libraries, 44(1). https://doi.org/10.5860/ital.v44i1.17373

Issue

Vol. 44 No. 1 (2025)

Section

From the Field

License

Copyright (c) 2025 Lydia Harlan

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors that submit to Information Technology and Libraries agree to the Copyright Notice.