It looks like Ramsey County's libraries may be having a rough time of it. Fewer items are circulating year by year. Visits to buildings are declining. Even internet hours are down.
It's never been easy to ferret out information like that in Ramsey County. But now residents can hop on the web and find such basic metrics of performance from not just the libraries, but a number of county entities.
A new "Open Data Portal" on the Ramsey County website is a user-friendly way for citizens to access public records.
The county's boast that it is "committed to greater transparency and accountability by providing public data online in a meaningful and accessible format" is the sort of verbiage you see a lot. The problem is that it often takes a Wonky McNerd to find it or make sense of it.
But in an era when many government officials bemoan the disconnect between the wealth of data that exists and the ease of finding it, Ramsey County's portal, unveiled late last month, seems like a start.
Visitors to the new site can find data on spending, maps of neighborhoods suffering high poverty and job trends, or see how the county stacks up against the six other core metro-area counties.
Four basic clusters at the outset yield to multiple options, including "Departmental Performance Measures," always a sensitive spot.
Key metrics of health can be spotted at once. For instance, one piece of good news for Ramsey County is that the share of its population that ranks as young adults — a retention challenge for many places these days — is climbing. That's not true for all counties.
