The Baton Rouge City Key website allowed us to create a one-stop shop for neighborhood-specific public and social services information. The Library previously created a print publication of community services for many years but this new site offers remote access and asset mapping to improve the depth, relevance and impact of our community directory. The site also contains data such as health and crime, which can be examined and overlaid to provide statistics to identify areas of community concern. This is extremely useful data for lawmakers as well as for grant writers seeking to get funding to rectify issues identified.

The key elements are the unusually transparent collaboration and engagement with the City/Parish government and other groups we’ve brought to the table. This has included statistics from the City/Parish’s open data initiatives, as well as reaching out to include more difficult-to-obtain data from different private data holders. Library staff across all of our 14 branches contribute events in their immediate areas and collate more unique data sets like public art locations or healthy food pop-ups. As the Library is positioned as an anchor for this project that is beneficial to the whole community, it raises the profile of the Library.

Local grant seekers have been funded due to data and visualization on the City Key. We’ve created strong partnerships between the disparate organizations working together on this to bring separate silos of information in to one place. Key partners are HealthyBR, The Mayor’s Office of Neighborhoods, and the City/Parish GIS department. With the site being focused on the neighborhood level this has contributed to the sense of neighborhood community. It has also encouraged staff at each branch to engage with their communities to find small-scale events such as church programs, neighborhood meetings or school events to add to the site.