Getting More Out of Library Databases Using Power BI: Fall 2026

This article is from the fall 2026 issue of Hearsay, the semi-annual newsletter of the Wheat Law Library.

This past summer, I was lucky to check something else off my bucket list: visiting the Library of Celsus in Ephesus at night. I wondered what my impression would be this time as someone who now works in library technical services. As I was admiring the towering structure, lit up for nighttime visitors, ever so careful not to step on the countless tiny frogs that populate the site, it is no surprise that the questions that popped up in my mind had to do with how they stored and located the items in their vast collection of scrolls. How they had achieved this is beyond the scope of this article, but they certainly lacked that sense of answers “at your fingertips” that we enjoy in libraries today thanks to library databases.

Behind the user interface that we use daily to query items individually is a relational database that houses metadata about our collection. With each search, we are asking a question to our database and getting answers through a set of results. What about questions whose answers are not readily available through the user interface of our systems? For example, those that require custom queries like, “How many items do we have at a specific location?”, “What was our most popular item last month?” or “How much did we spend on our items by fiscal year or vendor?”. To answer such macro-level questions and present their answers, we set out this year to diversify our toolkit for data retrieval and visualization. Among the many tools that could be used to achieve this, we chose Power BI for its integrability and visualization features. The custom database query feature allows us to run custom SQL scripts to use the thoroughness of the database to our advantage and fine-tune data retrieval. In all of this, we are aided by the meticulous work of library catalogers that underpin a thorough and well-structured dataset. This has resulted in smooth running queries, and the insights generated then became part of a data dashboard that can be updated regularly.

Thanks to these additional capabilities, we now have a new way to query our database and draw insights which could otherwise be as hard as it was for our ancient counterparts to find scrolls tucked away in the niches of the Library of Celsus.
 

Didem Blum
Technical Services Assistant