What IMLS Does

Sat, 03/22/2025 - 4:11pm by eli

Last week, the Institute for Museum & Library Services was the subject of an Executive Order, calling for it to be "eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law". A new Acting Director was appointed, who released a first statement. As I write this, it is unknown how the agency's programming, grantmaking, data collection, staffing, and support for local institutions across the US will be impacted.

We've started getting questions from AADL patrons about how this would impact AADL, wanting to know more about how IMLS supports AADL and other institutions. So, I'd like to cover what this means for AADL and its patrons, and recount some of the IMLS work that I've been involved with over my career, to help illuminate the broad range of public works they support, the efficiency and care with which that work is done, and the astounding impact of this tiny corner of the federal government.

TL;DR: While AADL does not receive any direct funding from the federal government or IMLS, AADL patrons do use statewide services, such as MeLCat, that could be affected if IMLS's grantmaking does not continue.

Read on for more about what IMLS is, all the important work it makes possible, what sorts of IMLS projects AADL has been involved with in the past, and how you can help. 

IMLS was established by the Republican congress in 1996, combining the National Commission on Library and Information Science and the Institute of Museum services in the Museum and Library Service Act, which was renewed in 2003 and again in 2010. It's an independent federal agency with about 75 full-time employees with a budget of around $300 million. For an agency that operates across the entire US, that is miniscule. To put that in perspective locally, the Ann Arbor Fire Department, that serves a community of about 125,000 residents across 28 square miles has 88 employees. The Ann Arbor Public Schools serve about 17,000 students with a staff of 2,000 employees and have an annual budget of around $300 million.

IMLS is responsible for 0.003% of the US federal budget and costs each American about 75 cents per year. But what they do with that sliver touches every US state and territory, and makes things possible across our society that would not have happened any other way. At the moment, you can see for yourself all the projects that IMLS has funded across the US in the past year with the $266 Million they awarded. (And here's a link to a January 2025 copy of their website from the Internet Archive, in case it's no longer there by the time you read this post.)

Michigan received about $8 Million in grants from IMLS in 2024. $4.8M of that is awarded to the Library of Michigan, sometimes called the State Library. At the moment, every state of the union has a State Library; in most states, it is both an archive of legislative and state history, and critical infrastructural and legal support for the libraries in their states. Two-thirds of IMLS's $266M in grants were paid to state or territorial libraries, in the form of $177M of LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act) grants. Each State Library then uses that funding to provide statewide services and smaller grants to libraries in their state, according to that State Library's goals and strategic plans.

In Michigan, that $4.8M funds the Michigan eLibrary, and MeLCat, which makes it as easy to borrow items from any library in Michigan as it is to borrow an item from another branch of your own library. AADL is a heavy user of MeLCat; in 2024 AADL patrons borrowed 23,181 items from other libraries through the system, and AADL loaned 20,796 to patrons of other libraries. From a technical perspective, MeLCat is an absolute marvel. It combines the catalogs of 437 different libraries into a single catalog of almost 35 Million copies of 9.5 Million different titles, all of it available to anyone with a library card at a participating library.

In addition to MeLCat, the Library of Michigan uses those IMLS funds to provide statewide access to 86 different databases through the Michigan eLibrary, including test prep, business databases, journals, magazines and more. But a large part of the good those IMLS dollars do for the state takes the form of the Library of Michigan's support for dozens of tiny, often rural libraries throughout Michigan, where they provide training for staff and boards, support for early literacy, digitization, and technology, and their own grantmaking program, powered by IMLS dollars, that are often the only way that small libraries are able to try anything new or adapt to the changing needs of their communities.

And that's all in addition to IMLS's direct grant programs. In 2024, on top of the $4.8M paid to the Library of Michigan to support MeLCat and all those other programs, another $1.8M went to 9 museum projects, and $1.6M went to 12 library projects. You can see the details of what those projects were directly from IMLS at the moment. There was also a $10,000 award to the Kent District Library, who won a National Medal for Library Service in 2024. Because in addition to all that work supporting the state libraries and their programs, and their National Leadership Grant program to spread innovation across the industry, and the Native American Library Service Enhancement Grants, IMLS also recognizes and honors excellence in their field.

When I look back through all the IMLS-funded projects I've participated in over my 27 years at AADL, I see some of the most exciting, innovative, and industry-leading work I've had the honor to be involved with. Starting in the late 1900s (ouch), I had the opportunity to work on some flash games to teach science to kids as a part of a partnership between AADL and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. I made a cave for players to search through, including a tectonic plate puzzle, an earthquake simulator, and an archeological dig. The next year I made a game about a stone-age village where you could tell each villager what you wanted them to work on that week. These games were loaded onto computers (oh yes, Bondi Blue iMacs) at the museum where kids could play them as part of their visit!

For several years, IMLS put on an annual conference called WebWise for staff from both Museums and Libraries to learn best practices from each other. I always found this conference to be an outstanding value for all involved; for a while it was where museums learned from libraries that putting their collections online led to more visits, not fewer visits; and where libraries learned from museums how to deliver high-quality, destination experiences to their patrons. In 2008, we were asked if AADL would be willing to throw something together for a WebWise preconference on mashups. (This was before everything was a mashup.) My team had an idea for a tool that could take data about items from museum collections, run it through a Yahoo! term-extraction system to get the important words from the title of the item and then search for matches on eBay. We called it GoldDiggr (missing vowels were still a new fashionable thing at the time) and demoed it during the conference, showing how data sources could be mashed together quickly in new and interesting ways.

Later at a session at that conference, I made a comment about how applying for federal grants can be a pretty heavy lift for small organizations along several axes; they can be complicated, require in-kind or dollar-for-dollar matches that would put them out of reach for many museums and libraries, and asked if there was some way to lower that threshold to provide smaller grants to smaller orgs without such a hill to climb to apply. An IMLS staffer later told me that my question led to the creation of the IMLS Sparks Ignition Grant program, which did exactly what I had hoped for, leading to some small orgs getting to do new things that might not have been able to apply for the larger grant programs. I later served on expert panels to review Sparks grant applications and other IMLS proposals, visiting IMLS's modest offices near L'Enfant Plaza in DC, where the creativity and innovation in our field -- and the extent of the need in community institutions across America -- was laid bare before us in the applications we reviewed.

Around 2010, AADL and several other libraries participated in an IMLS National Leadership Grant, led by the King County Library System, to help add functionality to the Evergreen open-source Library Automation System, created by the PINES Library Consortium in Georgia, to bring it to the point where it had what larger library systems expected out of their software. (I currently serve on the board of The Evergreen Project, the nonprofit that governs the software.) KCLS moved to Evergreen shortly thereafter, and AADL moved to it in 2018. To give an idea of the scale of the impact of that work, when we moved to a new commercial library system in 2005, it involved an initial purchase price around $500,000 and annual fees of $60,000. When we moved to Evergreen in 2018, it involved no license fee at all, and no annual software license maintenance costs, delivering a much better, more reliable, more flexible system than its proprietary competitors, thanks to the work funded by IMLS, and all the contributors who built Evergreen out along the way.

In 2013, I participated in a project led by the University of Washington and the Music Library Association to attack the thorny problem of how libraries could collect and archive online-only music that had no physical releases, and were only available through unstable platforms with complicated rights. AADL had become a leader in direct licensing at that time and it was an exciting discussion that led to a paper laying out the challenges for music libraries in future, that have only grown as physical music releases have dwindled and online music distribution has amalgamated.

This is just a sample of the things I've been directly involved with, leaving aside all the requests for information about AADL and our initiatives that came from IMLS-funded research projects at library schools across the US; the many IMLS-sponsored training events for library staff where I was invited to speak, and the frequent focus groups from IMLS grantees looking to inform their projects with what works and what doesn't across the industry.

While it only represents three thousandths of one percent of the federal budget, IMLS has touched just about every community of the USA through its most valued local and state institutions, with creativity, innovation, fairness, fiscal discipline, and a return on investment that business can only dream of. IMLS is government at its best; focused, nimble, cost-effective, providing broad value, and amplifying the impact of its dollars with every action it takes.

As of right now, there has not been news of IMLS staff being terminated, and the National Museum and Library Services board, which advises IMLS, sent a letter to their newly appointed director pointing out the laws that govern its existence, operation, and statutory requirements, clearly establishing IMLS as outside the discretionary reach of the Executive Branch. Some states are taking this opportunity to try to disband their State Library. The State of Michigan Department of Education has released a statement detailing the impact that the loss of LSTA funds would have in the state.  The Michigan Library Association has released a joint statement with a number of Michigan professional associations. While the near- and long-term future of this work is uncertain, It's very clear that the USA has much more to lose than it stands to gain from the elimination of the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

So what can patrons do about this? EveryLibrary, a national advocacy organization for Libraries, has launched saveimls.org , with several actions you can take to express your support for IMLS. Depending on what happens next, there may be a place for state-level advocacy to shore up the $5M in LSTA grants to the State Library, but it's too soon to say where any of this might lead.

If you've made it this far, you must really love libraries. Thank you for that love and concern. While AADL is relatively well-insulated from this moment, IMLS needs your support for all it does for communities across Michigan and the USA. Thank you so much for reading all this, and thank you for using your library!