“I haven’t seen another service that does what PolicyMap can do. We couldn’t have done this work any other way.” – Ed Garcia, Library Director, Cranston Public Library
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Challenge

As Cranston Public Library prepared its state-mandated five-year strategic plan, Library Director Ed Garcia knew that meaningful community outreach had to be grounded in evidence. The library wanted to understand where library card adoption was lowest across the city, and more importantly, why. While the city’s GIS department could offer some support, it could not provide the layered, interactive visualizations Cranston needed to connect demographics, geography, and service gaps. Without a clearer picture of who wasn’t being reached, the library risked spreading outreach efforts too thin across a city with no crosstown public transportation and branches of vastly different sizes.

Solution

To build that picture, Cranston’s youth services coordinator uploaded anonymized library cardholder addresses into PolicyMap and overlaid them with demographic, economic, and transportation datasets already available on the platform. The results revealed two census tracts with the lowest library card adoption in the city. Those same tracts also had some of Cranston’s highest concentrations of immigrant residents, greater economic challenges, limited access to transportation, and the library system’s smallest branch—a 550-square-foot location inside a senior center.


Those findings directly shaped Cranston's strategic plan. The library concentrated its school visits and community outreach in those two census tracts and partnered with a local health equity organization to staff a weekly farmers market in the area, connecting with a largely Southeast Asian population on their own terms through culturally relevant programming.


Now, as Cranston prepares its next strategic plan ahead of a 2027 deadline, the library plans to build on that work. In addition to repeating the library card mapping exercise, the team intends to layer in broadband access and public Wi-Fi usage data to build a more comprehensive, branch-by-branch picture of how each location serves its surrounding community. With the city facing budget pressures and questions about branch consolidation, PolicyMap will help Cranston present data-backed recommendations to trustees, city leaders, and planners—and make the case for where its libraries are needed most.