Good morning, good morning. I'm so happy to see all of you.
Welcome to Seattle. Those of you in the room, welcome virtually
to those of us joining us online. We are so happy you're
here. I'm Terry Devoe with MLS and we just are so pleased that
we continue to have this opportunity to bring everybody
together from the States and have this ongoing training.
It is an investment. We continue to feel that it's worthwhile and
our current leadership also feels that it's worthwhile and
we hope that's the case for a long time to come. But we don't
take it for granted and having you here is such a joy.
This is a state federal partnership program. We really
do think of it as a partnership and we hope that throughout the
conference we'll be listening to you as much as we hope you are
listening and learning from us.
I just have a few quick things that I'm going to say before we
get a nice welcome from our home state. So health and safety
wise, the masks this year are optional. You're welcome to wear
them as you see fit. And we've kept the health and safety dots.
I am wearing mine high in the eye line. If you want to put a
little knot in yours in the back and and do the same, you're
welcome to. They're not exactly adjustable, but you can sort of
make it work. So the green dots.
There, you know, I'm open for the hugs and the handshakes. The
yellow is a little more like fist bumps and elbow bumps and
red is I'm really still just distancing and that's OK. We do
have restrooms in the facility. If you kind of walk out the
doors and look to the left corner, there's a door that will
get you into the hallway with the restrooms. So they're here.
And because this is a hybrid conference, again, we learned a
lot last year and one thing everybody did really well and we
want to emphasize again.
Is using the microphone. It will help with the audio for those
who are listening in from home and it's going to help us have a
really good recording that we can put on the website after the
fact. So please, would you do have a question or a call out,
be sure you're using the microphone.
We we learned through some hybrid conference experience,
it's good to have a little placeholder on the slides for
that zoom box. So if you're tuning in remotely, that little
space which is consistent on all our slides is in the upper right
hand corner. So you should be able to just set your zoom
speaker box there and you won't miss any content. We have Cindy
and Laura over on the side who are kind of our auxiliary core
for the virtual.
Intentioned and although we're gonna get both of them up here
to stay remarks at different points in the conference, they
are doing the lion's share of lifting for virtual. So we
applaud you.
We also have interpreters here with us, so hopefully that's not
too distracting to anyone. But we have a variety of tables that
you can choose to sit at if it is. And I always like to give a
shout out to our tech team, which is giving us the sound and
the vision, two of our senses that we need for this
conference. We are recording and we will do our best to get these
slides shortly up on the website.
They just, it may take some time. Well, the slides are
there, I should say, but we're going to get the recorded videos
of all of our content over the next two days.
So one thing we haven't been able to do for a couple of years
is have an official welcome from our host state. And I'm so
pleased that this year it's working out. Sarah Jones is with
us from the Washington State Library. And in case you don't
know, it's not in Seattle. So she had to drive here in a lot
of traffic from Olympia, and we really appreciate her. Sarah
took the helm during the pandemic, really dynamic time
for all of the state libraries.
And she is just a force of energy and good ideas. She also
has some background in state libraries in Nevada and has
worked in public libraries as well. So please help me welcome
her so that she can welcome us.
Thank you. It's wonderful to be here and I wanted to take credit
for this weather, so I will.
It's such a wonderful thing when we get beautiful blue skies here
in the Pacific Northwest and my understanding is you may have
them today and for several days. So first of all on behalf I want
to thank or I want to welcome you all to the state of
Washington very specifically for from me as the state librarian.
But also my office is in the office of the Secretary of
State. So I want to welcome you on behalf of Secretary of State
Hobbs who is a wonderful supporter of libraries.
He was. He was the governor Inslee gave him the post to
after our current Secretary of State moved to Washington DC to
fight election disinformation. So we were really proud of that.
And then last November he won a reelection to just finish her
term. So he will be running again in November of 24. So we
are Secretary of State election season all the time, but I just
want to say a few words on behalf of.
Secretary Hobbs. In his passion for libraries and library
services, Secretary Hobbs is the first person of color to hold
the office of the Secretary of State in the state of
Washington. He's Japanese American and he's a true
believer in libraries. One of the things that he will, a story
that he will often tell is he grew up in the Pacific Northwest
and as a young person, his he was in a single parent home,
single mother, and the library was his sanctuary and one of the
things he did in that sanctuary.
Was played dungeons and Dragons, and he had great support from
the library there and the librarians, and it was the place
where he felt safe and able to express himself. He, as you
would can imagine, experienced a great deal of racism, including
someone painting, you know, some terrible words on their door and
on their on their front lawn. So he really understands why
libraries are so important as sanctuaries, as places where we
feel safe.
And he continues to be a huge supporter of Dungeons and
Dragons and other role-playing tabletop gaming, which I'm
learning a whole lot about because one of the things he's
tasked us to do, and we are going to use some some of our
LST allotment with, is to really support role-playing, gaming and
particularly dungeons and Dragons. So you're in the home
of Dungeons and Dragons. Wizards of the Coast is here in the
state of Washington and Dungeons and Dragons.
For those of you that are players or no players, is will
be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2024. So this
very week we are going to the Washington Library Association
conference in Wenatchee, which is the Apple capital of the
world. If you didn't know that and that we are going to have a
session on why role-playing gaming is really important for
all kinds of social, emotional reasons, collaboration, 21st
century skills.
And then in the after dark session, we're going to play a A
we're going to play a game and have people watch people playing
that game. And the whole idea is that we're going to support
gaming and libraries with some resources, particularly the
games themselves, but also helping people with, you know,
finding, you know, experts in their area to support that
gaming. But there's a really important part of this in
addition to it just being in libraries and in the safe.
Space of libraries, we are also going to do this in our
institutional libraries, which are correctional centers and two
psychiatric hospitals. And very recently we just opened a
library in a female juvenile detention center. So we're also
going to be deploying gaming in those aspects and we're also
going to be deploying it through the Washington talking book and
Braille Library. So we have assistive ways to to play those
games too. So stay tuned. I think we might be.
You know, one of the few states in the nation that are leading
this at a statewide level, especially with the broad
perspectives of inclusivity and accessibility. So I wanted, I
think that that's an important part of knowing that how lucky I
am to be in a state agency that is so supportive of our work as
it is and has and as it can be. So the other thing I wanted to
tell you is that I heard this wonderful story and since it's,
you know, blue sky out there, I can tell it because.
Sorry, I hate to tell it when it's dreary and dark and cloudy
because you wouldn't know what I'm talking about, but this is a
story that came from the Washington Poet Laureate. Her
name is Reena Priest, and she tells a story about Mount Baker
and Mount Rainier, which you often cannot see when it's Gray
outside. But the story, then the legend is that the two mountains
were once married. Mountain Baker is the the male gender in
the story, and Mount Rainier is the female.
Gender in the start. So they were married, but they ended up
not getting along, so they parted. So the the the legend is
that Mount Rainier, which is very true for anyone who's lives
here or visits here often. You often can't see Rainier. You
can't often see Baker either, but Rainier is often even in a
blue sky. The clouds will kind of top the peak. And the story
is that Rainier hikes from Mount Baker purposefully so he can't
find.
Her or see her. So I love that story. And as I say, those of us
who live in the Pacific Northwest and here in the Puget
Sound, you, you know, when you get the glimpse of especially
right near, it's just breathtaking. And you have the
pleasure today if you can get out to see all of our mountains
because I think we're often not, you know, not really thought of
this huge amount in the state because we often can't see them.
I also know that you are going to have the opportunity to
visit.
The Washington talking book and Braille Library today, I really
hope you take advantage of that. It's a short walk. It will be a
beautiful walk. There's lots of great places to eat that you can
find something quick. But we are very proud of the Washington
talking book and Braille Library. It was the network
library of the Year last year for the third time. So we're
very excited about that. It is also innovative and does
incredibly exciting programs, but in addition to that.
That's a very cool building. It's a building that used to be
a Dodge dealership. So when you come, there's kind of a round
front of it. And then it once had, it was in the 50s and it
had a turntable. So the brand new Dodge could be on a
turntable and the people walking by could see it and admire it
and desire it and come by 1. So we're really there. There's a
number of reasons for you to see that wonderful facility. And
then as I mentioned briefly, so I.
Was able to bring hand out to you all the services that the
state library is providing here in the state of Washington. And
just to give you an idea, but we do have the four components. We
have the library development group, which I think Claire is
here, she's our representative from Washington and the Library
Development Group, as you know, does the work that you're all
here to talk about. I'm really proud of them. They do excellent
work. They've been incredibly committed to really doubling
down.
Especially during the pandemic to make sure that our libraries
are served. And I think most importantly as all of us, I came
from the Public Library world just most recently. What we
needed in the pandemic was flexibility. So ohh a huge
thanks to I'm less for both the cares and the art of funding
funding because that did give us that flexibility so we could
meet libraries where they were. So for many of our libraries,
you know, is because we have very large libraries like the
King County system.
King County Library system in Seattle public and we have very
small libraries in the most rural components of our state.
So as you can imagine the things that we supported were had that
broad breadth. So for King County we supported lockers
excuse me so people could come get their resources and then
rural Stevens County great deal of support for a Wi-Fi hotspots
which were really and still are unfortunately some of the only
ways people can get connected to the Internet in that part of our
state.
So library development does a lot of exciting work. We also
have pretty important state funding that supports our work
too. We are in legislative session right now and we just
found out yesterday that our funding for a program that
supports Microsoft certification, LinkedIn learning
including lynda.com that has been funded by the governor's
budget, the Senate, the House and it's been recommended for
ongoing. So we have been getting it one shot.
Since 2013, but if we get it ongoing then it will be
permanently in our base budget. We are also getting
significantly more resources for institutional libraries which I
mentioned is the the program where we support. We have 12
facilities in correctional centers, psychiatric hospitals
and recently a juvenile detention center and we're
hoping to add the other center that is for young men. So we're
really proud of that if you are looking towards.
Making sure that that library work is equitable, providing
libraries for incarcerated individuals, I think is really
incredibly important in that work. I think we're getting more
and more aware of. One of the things that I think is less
aware than people would know is 95% of people who are
incarcerated will return, will leave incarceration and will
come to society. And it's a very, very difficult path for
those folks to come in and find jobs and find.
Ways to really thrive in this society. So one of the things
that we have that's a really important partnership is the
fact that our local libraries partner with us and we can get
someone the local library card as they're being released from
their incarceration so that hopefully they can find that
same library services that they had in their institution. So
we're excited about that. And also I can't not mention
anywhere we are hiring, we have about 10 positions.
Open up in the in the ILS system. So if you know anyone
that would like to have, you know, really an impactful career
there, there are both librarian positions and paraprofessional
positions and they're located all throughout the state. And
then, so I think I've covered them, library development,
institutional libraries, the talking book and Braille Library
and our wonderful library development group. And I just
want to end with a huge thank you for all the work that you
do.
As Terry's mentioned, I've been in and about.
This work either as a second time as a state librarian, but
always findings both library services and Technology Act, and
I've been able to be a principal investigator for several Laura
Bush grants and this money makes such a difference. I think the
part that I always feel so strongly about is it's not
enough to do something completely, but it's almost
always enough to leverage the other resources that the local
resources, the state resources, the philanthropy.
To get really spectacular things done. So thank you on on behalf
of the Washington State Library and welcome to Washington.
Thank you, Sarah, so much for those rallying words. We're
going to make good investments here this week. That's what
we're doing. What we are going to do actually is give everyone
a chance to who's in the room, get out of their seat and we're
going to do a quick icebreaker. We haven't done this format for
a while, but what we have in mind is we'd like to create.
So basically like a big conga line of y'all that represents,
you know, people that are new to the state library administrative
agency, maybe you've been there weeks, months, days, and on this
end of the spectrum you've been there decades. So everybody can
line up in the room. Those of you who are online, you're going
to chat into the box, you know your name, your state, how long
you've been in the state library and your role and once we get
people in the room.
Signed up. Then we'll pass the mic and they can sort of do the
same. And then we'll hear from Cindy and Laura as sort of a
wrap up as to who's with us virtually. So you got a few
minutes to get yourselves organized here in the room and
go, alright, Laura, kick us off. Hi, I'm Laura Hicks. I'm the
state data coordinator in Maryland and I am the backup to
our state grants coordinator. And I've been with the Maryland
State Library for seven weeks.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Jeff Regensburger with the state
Library of Ohio. I'm a library consultant and LSA coordinator,
and I've been with the state Library of Ohio for seven
months.
I'm tulala Florko and I'm from Idaho. I've been in the position
for 13 1/2 months and I'm the grants and contracts officer.
Hi, my name is Amanda Gammon. I'm the LSA coordinator for
California, and I've been there just over a year, 14 months.
Hi, my name is Kate Ingy and I'm the grants and continuing
education coordinator for the Alaska State Library and I've
been there for 15 months and doing my job for about 3-3
months.
My name is Tara McLeod and I'm with Oklahoma Department of
Libraries and I am the federal programs officer and business
manager, and I've been in that role for 18 months.
My name is Tammy Lee and I'm the state library director from
Minnesota. I've been in my job for about a year and a half.
And I have a very sad sack story about really desiring an LSD
coordinator not being able to have one. So I'm gonna ask me
about it, but bring a napkin.
Hi, I'm Ashley. I work for the Montana State Library as an
accountant and I've been there for, I think two years in
October.
Good morning. I'm Amy Parker Disorbo from the United States
Virgin Islands. I'm the territorial director for
libraries, archives and museums for the Virgin Islands, and it
will be two years in June.
Hi, I'm Bruce Smith. I'm the project coordinator for
Wisconsin at the Department of Public Construction. I've been
there three years, which means I started at the beginning of the
pandemic.
Good morning. My name is Christine Weiss. I'm from the
Hawaii State Public Library system. I've been with the
system for a little over three years, but been in the LSST
coordinator and special projects librarian for about a year.
I'm Alice Smith and I'm the LSA coordinator and also a state
data coordinator for Kansas, and I've been in my position a
little over three years. Also putting me right at the
beginning of the pandemic as well.
I'm Wendy Copeland, and I'm the director of finance and grants
at South Carolina State Library. And because I started about five
years ago, it's pandemic years, so it's like dog years and
things like that. Really long time.
I'm Jessica Otto. I've been at the Wyoming State Library for
almost five years now, but next week I start as the research and
statistics consultant and working with IMLS stuff.
I'm Natalie dunnaway. I am the grant programs coordinator with
the Mississippi Library Commission. I've been there now
for a little over five years, but I started my job as grant
programs coordinator right in 2020, March 2020. So everything
I know, all the wisdom I have, has been learned remotely.
Correct.
That's a lot.
Hey, I'm Mary raymie. I'm the grants coordinator for the
Maryland State Library Agency, and I've been there for a little
over five years.
Good morning. I'm Rebecca Camp, and I am the state data
coordinator for the Montana State Library. I see her
everywhere.
She said she's been there five years.
I'm Angela fox. I'm the federal projects coordinator for
Indiana, which means I do the annual report and LSA. So I know
there's some other annual report people here so they could hear a
lot more of me on those listservs, and I've been yelling
at them for 5 1/2 years.
I'm Carmen Redding from North Dakota. I started as the school
and Youth Services and I am now the library Services division
director and it will be 6 years in July and I'm retiring in
August.
Hi, I'm Nicole apophony. I am the LSTA coordinator and library
development coordinator at the Rhode Island Office of Library
and Information Services. It will be 6 years in May that I
have been with the State library agency.
Hi, I'm Lindsay Forbes. I'm the project manager and grant
specialist at the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners,
and I will also have been at the agency for six years in May. I
didn't know she was good.
Hi, I'm Katherine Prince with the state library of North
Carolina. I'm the federal programs consultant and I've
been at the state Library for 7 1/2 years.
Suman Jones, LSA coordinator for the state of Nevada, and I have
been there for eight years.
Hey, Sadia Cleveland. I am from Pennsylvania. I have been the
LSA coordinator for nine years, but I'm a lifelong learner. So
does that count?
Lynn Burris with the state of Mississippi Library Commission
and almost 90 years.
I'm Sarah black. I'm with the DC Public Library and I've been
there for 9 years. Almost done.
Supported him Terry Bluebelt, but I'm from Missouri and I've
been with the Secretary of State's office for 20 1/2 years,
but with the state library, which is a part of the Secretary
of State's office for almost 10.
I'm Laura Walsh. I'm with the New Jersey State Library, and
before that I was in a Washington State library. But I
kind of have amnesia and I'm not sure exactly how many years.
I'm Claire Amara and I took over Mary's job at the Washington
State Library six months ago, but I had been at the Alaska
State Library before that for 11 years total.
I'm Erica McCormick from the Texas State Library and Archives
Commission. I've been there. I should have known. I did know
this eleven years, but I've been to USA coordinator for three,
and I am the manager of the grants and accreditation team.
Good morning, everyone. I'm Evan strubel. I'm the associate state
librarian for the state Library of Ohio. I've been in that role
for almost five years, but I've been at the state library for
12. I, too, will also be hiring, so if you need to give me a job,
I have a consultant position coming open soon. Come talk to
me.
Hi, I'm Kim Armantrout from the Library of Virginia. I am the
state aid administrator, the SDC, and now the LSA
coordinator.
Hi, I'm Brenda Hamilton with the South Dakota State library. I am
the access and development services manager. I've been
there 14 years and I've been the LSTA coordinator for about two.
I'm Michael Golick with the state library of Louisiana. I've
been at the state library there for 14 and a third years.
Because I did the math. Because I've just, as I said, I've been
the state data coordinator. I've been the associate state
librarian since November 15th. So, and I too am hiring. I have
a position open now. The application deadline is April
9th.
Hello, I'm Jamie Ball, grants administrator for the Arizona
State Library. And I've been there 15 plus years.
I'm Susan Mark with the Wyoming State Library. I've been with
the state library 21 years, and I'm not sure how long I've been
LSA coordinator. I think it's 7 ish, and I used to be the SEC.
Amy Heefner from the New York State Library.
I'm from the New York State Library and I think I've been to
LA coordinator for six or seven years. Before that I was the
SEC, and before 2012 I worked in the research Library and
reference.
I'm Karen Reese from the Library of Michigan, and that does sound
familiar. I started as one of the research librarians for the
legislature in 1999, so I've been there for 24 years, 19 the
LSST coordinator, and I'm also the Grand Coordinator, and I'm
also the school library consultant.
I'm Jennifer Cowan Henderson. I'm at the Tennessee State
Library and archives. I have been there for 25 1/2 years.
I've worked with LSA for about 10 years, but been the
coordinator for the past three.
And I do a lot of things.
I'm Debbie Hall from Arkansas State library. I'm manager of
grants and I have been there for 37 years, 22 of which has been
the LSA coordinator.
Hi, good morning. My name is Hector Reyes. I'm operation two
years operation Manager Service program, Library services
program in Puerto Rico, Department of Education and one
month coordinator and to No2 year development.
Thank you, everybody. Alright, everybody in the room can like
make their way back to their seats. Thank you so much. What a
demonstration of the vast institutional knowledge we have
here. So be sure that you grab some before the end of the two
days. And now we're going to beam over to our virtual set and
hear from Cindy briefly who's in the room. So we have this
Microsoft the whole time. So I don't know what to say.
The minute that will hurt all that. So we have about 22 folks
in the virtual room and some of you have a real family look.
Come see you later or I will find you.
We have a lot of folks in the two to five year range, which is
not not surprising. We have Lauren, 10 months or any in
Florida, 22 years. Sam from Nebraska 14 years. Jean and
Colorado 18 years. Brenda in Iowa one year. New Mexico has a
new coordinator who's been there nine months, but Karen Egan. God
bless.
29 years, she wins the virtual raffle. That's it. So thanks
everybody. Alright, thank you all so much.
I'm going to wrap up this section with a little bit of
IMLS overview. It's kind of like the flotsam and jetsam that we
didn't fit into other sessions. So you're going to get it all
here. But just by way of saying welcome again, you know, we
welcome you aboard the grants to states bus. And this bus is full
of some wonderful, fun, kind, responsive federal folks, public
servants that I have the pleasure of working with every
day.
And we are lucky enough to work with you in our work, and that
makes our work worthwhile. There's room on this bus for a
friend or 50, so hop aboard and you know the next two days will
be a fun time of learning and collaboration.
We have some program updates and conference notes to share with
you. So this is going to be kind of a flyby. Last year's
conference theme was news when we were in Baltimore. And I I
think it's safe to say like this was the noisiest year we've ever
had in the program. You were all finishing up your stimulus
funds, you were doing five year planning activities and we've
spent the last nine months trying to elevate all that work
in our various communications channels. I won't belabor it
here, but you can check it out.
And and I do want to say that we have two of our own
communications colleagues with us this conference, Erica and
Dan, and they're actually going to be doing short interviews
with some of you, you know who you are and that's going to be
upstairs. And we hope to take little sound bites from those
interviews and feature them on our social media. So this is the
first time we're trying that. We're pretty excited.
We have in other news reached a very important milestone in our
statute, which locks in a base of $1,000,000 for States and
$100,000 for territories. It's due to the very large program
bump that we got this year in our overall program budget. So
congratulations to all of you for doing great work and
reminding Congress that it's important, important work and
worthy of getting more money.
Not all news in grants to states is positive and happy. So let me
bring it down for a moment as I have a heart to heart with you
about extensions.
So we've had a number of extensions the last few years
owing to the stimulus funds and supply chain issues and all
kinds of other things that were outside of your control. And
we've tried to be very flexible and very accommodating and we've
given a lot of extensions. So at this point, we're kind of back
getting back to normal order. You're going to have your normal
allotment every year. You're probably going to have two
grants that you're administering at any given time, we think
that.
Scenario usually gives states enough flexibility to
accommodate those strange things that are happening with their
money. And so we'd really like to rein in all the extensions.
So as 20 fiscal 2022 is coming to an end and you're going to be
reporting on it, you know it will end in September and you'll
be reporting on it thereafter. If you're sensing that you're
having the same kind of issues coming up into fiscal 2022, just
think creatively about could you use your fiscal 23 money and and
sort of work through.
Some of that, it's not that we're not gonna grant
extensions, it's just that they're gonna have a really high
bar and we always have to escalate those up to other
offices in our agency. And so they're going to want to see the
evidence that this was truly outside of your control and if
you can come to us before a period of performance ends, so
that's usually September 30th, that helps us stay within our
regulatory framework. So PSA for the good of the order.
This is a visual of the SPQR Cliff as I like to call it.
There are implications for extensions in the SPR and this
has been a driver for this program. This is a visual I've
been carrying around in my head for the last two years and I've
finally put it down on paper. So there's a lot of words on this
slide. But the basic gist is that in a normal reporting year,
when you've got two grants, you sort of finished up your SPR. We
sort of carry it to the finish line with program officer input
and then there's a little bit of a buffer zone where we allow the
maintenance of effort.
Sort of numbers to be locked in and you've got a little buffer
before you start the next year's report. But if you have a nine
month extension, there is no longer any buffer and you're
basically finishing both reports out at the same time. Which is
very frightening when I think about those of you having to do
this work and sort of toggling between the different years. And
it's just rife with opportunities for things to go
sideways. So we have to, by law, give you 120 days to finish your
reporting.
If you see fit to finish it earlier, I think it'll be good
for all of us. PSA #2, the next three slides come from a
colleague of ours who wasn't able to travel with us to
Seattle. She's our director of grants policy and management,
Connie Bodner, and she's been helping us sort of go through
some of these changes at the government level that are
affecting all of us this year. So I'm not going to belabor
these three slides because they're here.
You want to revisit them, but I've got kind of a sound bite
for each one of them with the unique entity identifier, which
was the changeover that the sam.gov system implemented last
year for the first time. It's been a rocky first year. We all
recognize that the take away that we've been getting is that
there should be a one time pain point theoretically, and that
going forward renewal should be much, much, much smoother.
However, if you let your renewal apps, you may be in danger.
With having to do a lot more paperwork again in the future.
So our words to the wise are do not let your registration lapse.
Like keep it active and you may not be the person sitting here
in this room that's responsible for that, but be in touch with
your colleagues who are.
Login.gov is a system of authentication for different
government systems and we have implemented it this year for our
EMS system, which is our electronics grants management
system. We haven't had a lot of feedback about how this is going
from the states, so if you've experienced any pain points,
we'd be interested in hearing from you about it. And there's
some resources on this slide that can help if you have been
in that position of having some issues.
We want you to get paid when you get the grant money. And so our
colleague has laid out a number of, you know, pitfalls that we
run into that prevent us from making your payments to you
quickly. And again, we may have a few people in the room that
are responsible for requesting drawdown payments from IMS, but
if this is not you, make sure that your fiscal counterparts
get access to this information. The one thing I want to
highlight here is in sort of an internal review of how much
people are asking.
To draw down funds, we've seen that some States and some
entities ask for multiple amounts of money in any given
month, and if it's possible to consolidate that to maybe 2
draws a month, that would make our work a lot easier. So we
humbly beseech you to tighten that up if possible.
Some of you know about limited English proficiency. Some of you
may not wonder what we're talking about here. This is a
policy requirement of the program. It often comes up
around the time that we make site visits because it's on our
site visit checklist, and we start asking you if you feel
policy for it. This is just to say that we've heard from our
legal counterparts that I'm LS who have heard from our
Department of Justice counterparts in the federal
government that there are changes coming to this policy,
which is government wide.
And that as soon as we get more information, we will roll it out
to you.
We're going to again partner with Kosla on the National Book
Festival. Some of you in the room are the people that travel
to Washington, DC for this and some of you are not. But we have
heard that the date is going to be moved earlier this year.
Library of Congress has not yet publicly announced this. So if
you need, if you are on a need to know basis, you can track
down me or Dennis and we can tell you, but I'm not going to
proclaim it publicly until they do. We are thinking this year
that we're going to give an additional about $1000.
Per state, which will enable there to be perhaps local events
that sort of hearken to the National Book festival in your
area. And these would take advantage of the great reads
books that are picked by each state to be featured at the
National Book Festival. And they would allow you to, you know,
tie them into the National Book Festival, acknowledge IMS with
funding, and sort of have that footprint of National Book
festival iness in your community. If you're hearing all
this and saying, wow.
That sounds like a lot of work, and we're not cut out for that.
That's OK. We think you could also use those funds to offset
more travel if you have to send more people or buffer unexpected
travel costs, or if you want to send more exhibit materials to
Washington, DC, maybe you want to print and ship some extra
things. But we're going to give you this extra amount of money
this year and see how it goes.
We've got a great couple of days planned for you now. We're
getting into the conference proper. Just a couple of things
to highlight on this slide. Our director, Crosby Kemper, will
speak to us tomorrow. He's actually in the building. You
may see him, but he's off doing other other excursions today and
other visits with institutions. But think about questions you
may want to ask him tomorrow. We've got 45 minutes with him
and it is probably the last year.
That he will be with us because he is coming to the end of his
tenure with MLS. So get him now.
The optional lunch tour at the Talking Book and Braille
Library, that's Sarah so graciously extended to us is
something I'm going to walk over to. So if you'd like to join me
on my walking excursion, I'll probably stand outside at the
registration desk at the lunch hour and then I'm going to go
because we need like 20 minutes to get over there and I don't
want to cut anyone's lunch short, but we're very excited
about seeing this ex car dealership facility and all the
exciting things it does today.
All right. In terms of the logistics, we do have kind of a
yellow cover colored survey in your conference package should
be the last sheet in your paper clipped packet. We take the
feedback from this survey really seriously every year and we make
iterative improvements to this conference. We also have the
conference survey available by URL if you prefer to fill it out
that way or for those of you who are tuning in virtually, we
tried two things last year.
That we're reviving and they're over on this side of the Deus
one is a peer-to-peer appreciation wall. We are going
to do formal recognition this afternoon, so some of you have
already sourced those People's Choice Awards and we will
formally acknowledge them then. But if you just want to give a
shout out to someone who's, you know, helped you find a great
lunch eatery or just whatever, you can take the sticky notes at
your table, write a little piece of appreciation and stick it on
the appreciation.
Small and we will revisit those at the end of tomorrow. We also
have a parking lot for sessions like this where I'm just trying
to cram everything in and we don't have time for questions.
So if you have questions that remain unanswered that you would
like us to address tomorrow morning stick them on the
parking lot and we will sort of have a a grab bag of questions
that we can answer tomorrow morning. We have a dine around
sheet on the side of the room. So if you're looking to have a
dinner out with some of the.
Fabulous people in this room, but you don't know where to
start. We've got several restaurants identified. Thank
you, Dennis, who vetted these restaurants. One in particular,
wild ginger, I've heard is an excellent Thai restaurant. So
just sign yourself up in a slot. And then after the conference is
over, you may want to connect to yourselves, figure out when
you're dining, whether you need a reservation, etcetera.
If you're drowning in our acronyms, I'm sorry. We do have
an online handout that we sort of summarize these up last week
and you're welcome to reference it throughout. And just hang in
there with us. You spent, you know, as many years as Debbie.
You're going to eventually get those acronyms. We've taken some
inspiration from this beautiful city that we're in, Seattle,
which has a nickname of the Emerald City, so our conference
theme this year.
Is the Wizard of Oz, and you're going to see some references to
that in our slides throughout bad puns, etcetera.
I never like to hold appreciation till the end when
like half of our attendees have left. So I just want to say
initially we have a official meeting planner, Matt Brodetsky
and Anna who.
Do you so much? They get you here, they facilitate your
travel, they get this beautiful room figured out and set up,
they handle the beautiful recording with experts from our
tech and audio team, and we just could not do these conferences
without them.
We've got again interpreters and tech staff who are our silent
auxiliary corps. We so appreciate you. We Co host this
conference with Imolese staff from the Office of Research and
Evaluation and we will be introducing our IMS selves to
you throughout the program. Bus to suffice it to say that Matt
and Emily are true partners in this and we could not do this
conference without their help.
Yeah.
We have a new colleague we're going to introduce to you this
afternoon. As we think about support for the SPR, we've
always got support from our office of Chief Information
Officer staff. Again, we've got office of communication staff
here and of course you who have taken your time to be in this
room and my colleagues, the grants to state staff, you guys
make this conference the wonderful thing that it is and
we are so excited about the next two days.
Those of you have been with the program a few years, have seen
the star on the left a few times because we've been saying you
can do hard things, states. And last year we had a humble
request from one of you to start doing easy things because you
were tired of those hard things. So maybe the time is now, maybe
this is the year let's all shift into doing some.
Easy things. So I would just say set your burdens down on the
grants to states bus the next few days. We're here for you. We
get to lean on each other and and let's go forward and do some
easy things together. Thank you.
All right. We took a few extra minutes from that session, but I
know that Emily is a pro and will catch us right up for our
break. Emily Plowman is, as you've seen her last year in
Baltimore, just A and she was a face last year on the screen
because she did not make it physically, but she's here this
year, which is so exciting. Emily, last year was part of our
auxiliary staffing team and is now a full IMS member.
Which is owing to not only the wonderful things that she does
for us as an agency all the time, but I would say Matt
Birnbaum's creative approaches to hiring. So we're thankful to
both of them. Emily is the strategic evaluation and
research officer for IMLS. She has done deep dives with us on a
number of our initiatives including five year plans. And
since last year we sort of departed Baltimore with those
plans being due within days, we never really had a chance to
talk about them.
So we're going to spend a little time revisiting plans from last
year, so please help me welcome, Emily.
Right.
OK, so I am Terry, going to catch us up. Just to give the
tech team a heads up, I'm going to go faster than you can click
your heels together three times and say there's no place like
home.
I also, you know, I would be remiss if, as the data lady, you
can just call me that from IMLS didn't do some kind of informal
assessment when we were doing introductions.
As you all were lined up here, I noticed that there tended to be
more titles on that end of the room than on this end. So for
those of you who are looking for career advancement, it doesn't
seem like you get rid of what you do as you advance. You just
get more.
So, you know, but everyone's hiring, so keep going.
OK. So we're going to just start really briefly. I'm going to go
through some of the major topics that we saw really pop up in the
five year plans. The next slide is a list of is a bar chart that
we would have showed, Oh my gosh, why am I telling the tech
people to do this? I have the clicker myself. Sorry guys, me,
I need to pay attention.
So we saw this slide at the last conference where we looked at
the different topical areas that showed up really commonly in the
plans that you submitted. I went through and looked at a lot of
the comments that the program officers pulled out as they were
reading through each of your plans and just kind of looked at
what it was in these most common topics that we were seeing in
terms of where you're investing dollars. And I'm not going to
read every single note on each slide.
But library workforce shows up the most. Not a huge surprise.
That's a really easy thing to fund, get staff training,
support, student advancement, help with elevating the
competencies of libraries. But it was by far. It's almost a
universal funding mechanism that you all use with your grants to
states money and and plan to use with your grants to states money
reading shows up next, almost also nearly universal.
Reading an early literacy have different, have very similar and
a lot of overlapping concepts. But literacy tends to be really
broader of course, right? We're not talking about early
childhood literacy. Summer reading though tends to fall in
this category more than we see it fall into the early literacy.
One thing that I thought was really interesting reading
through all of the comments for reading is that it could be
broad. You know we're going to reach the whole community for
reading.
All levels and identification of specific activities or we have
the example in Wyoming and other areas where they're supporting
reading in places like prisons are harder to reach populations.
We see broadband of course also show up. This doesn't count. You
know, this is another place where there's overlap. You'll
see it in some of the other slides, but there's this nearly
universal commitment to accessibility with broadband. So
we do see investments, people planning to invest in things
like equipment or infrastructure.
Grades, training, et cetera. But it's this topic for almost all
of you, is really about getting access to your pot, your entire
state, populations. There's not necessarily a particular focus
on a type of population. This is a universal access concept.
For early, for early learning. This of course is our is a bread
and butter issue for libraries. We have things like partnerships
that show up here. I really liked how like in the Washington
example, they talk about sharing best practices for early
learning. And when we had our convening for reading last March
in Washington DC, sharing best practices showed up as the
number one.
One of the number one things that all librarians wanted in
terms of being able to advance early learning concepts in
libraries. So early learning broadly and sharing this best
practices really hit hits on that one. That one stood out to
me. Georgia talked about targeting a very specific type
of reading, so early learning can be broad. It can also be one
example, one specific program.
The non library workforce tended to be one of the more broader
topics where we saw more variety in what people were going to be
planning to spend money on and this could be job or digital
skills training, making job information accessible. Good
overlap of the digital or broadband access concepts here
too Tennessee talks about partnering with the Treasury,
Arkansas talks about free access.
Going to get free access statewide to those rural
populations. So that's another good example of an overlap,
reusing money for core concepts both in one topic that you might
be primarily focused on and then in another like broadband where
that's just such a major issue for rural populations.
We will take a 30 second commercial break so I can make a
shameless plug for my MLS report that the Office of Research and
Evaluation supported funding through Kasla last year. This is
this was conducted by Mount Auburn Associates. And one thing
that I just really wanted to highlight here is that it it's
looking at the different types of workforce activities that
public libraries offer and the original concept was what are
the trends, what do we see?
If we were to interview every single branch across the United
States, what's kind of the common denominator of what
libraries offer and what we we ended up having to dial that
back because trying to interview every single branch in the
United States would have done several people under and it just
was really, it ended up being really logistically challenging.
So we did case studies instead and not surprisingly but also
surprisingly, we found that libraries in this area in
particular.
They have very strong passionate like want to provide a workforce
role. There's there's really this like gap filling element
that libraries tend to recognize in themselves. We aren't the
primary workforce drivers in our community unless there is not
one, unless there is not a workforce element where the
people who provide tech where tech is not available in
workforce training.
And that there's so, so much variety in terms of how
libraries step into these roles that they're. I would guess if
we were to go out and look at all the branches across the
United States and the structures within systems, it would be
incredibly hard to come out with a consistent trend. In the same
way we might see what libraries do for early literacy or in the
same way of what we might, might see libraries do for summer
reading. So anyway, go online.
Visit the report. Thank you for the time. Now back to our
normally scheduled programming.
Humanities was a super interesting topic that came up.
This one also had a lot of variety in what people
considered maybe some type of humanities concept. And I should
say some of this has some, I am less interpretation on it. You
did not check a box anywhere in your report that said that this
happened. So if you don't remember writing humanities and
you know, you know something like that shows up, that was our
interpretation of what you were committing to.
I have to also give another shameless plug for America 250.
Arizona is committing funds to help promote civic conversations
for the America 250 effort, and that's something I'm unless is
also fairly involved in rural and hard to reach populations
for those of you that have an area and a focus. And here we
see a lot of things like bookmobiles, mail programs,
expansion of digital materials, my home state, tiny, tiny town
of Iowa.
Um, the the Iowa example really spoke to me, the rural shrink
smart program, not about plastic wrap, it is about helping small
populations plan for their population shrinking, which is
really interesting in my mind because a lot of times is how do
we keep our communities vital, but how do you actually
anticipate kind of this outflow within your community. So I had
to throw that in there.
OK, so that was very fast. Thank you to the translator for
keeping up with me. We're going to do about.
A couple of speed round activities. So you've gotten up
and gotten your blood flowing in the room. We are going to do a
speed challenge and we're going to keep, we're going to do
however many rounds we can get to before we have to go on
break. And what's going to happen here is that you're going
to get.
2 minutes to go around your tables and identify programs in
starting with non library workforce and then rural and
hard to reach populations, broadband and early literacy. So
start the first round is non library workforce and the
challenge with this is brevity. So how many programs can you
list at your tables in a 2 minute time period? So you need
a counter.
And then you get 30 seconds to identify what you think might be
the most unique program. And this is going to be hard because
I've intentionally not defined unique. I have intentionally not
to find what fits and non library workforce. So you're
just it's going to be a little wild, you're just going to have
to go with what you come up with.
For those of you online you're gonna be furiously typing in
chat and once we get through the I'll I'll call the two minutes
you get 30 seconds to pick the most unique example that came up
at your table and then we'll do a quick report out to see how
many people were able to identify how many programs you
were able to identify and an example of unique program and
this might we might just have time for one. So let's start
with non library workforce remarks.
Cassette go and lucky you were about ready to head off to
break, so once we get done with the report out, I won't make you
do the other three categories.
If I could get Dennis and Madison just to help out, grab
mics and go around each of the tables, we're going to start in
that corner just so you have five more seconds to figure out
who's going to go and what you're going to say. And we'll
just go around around the room and then we'll go online and
then we get break.
I'm going to sit back here. Hey, guys.
Again, we had a a little bit of a difference between states that
do subgrants and states that don't.
But what we came up with the most unique was, um, technically
she was mostly 2022 funding, but we had a community that is very
wealthy. They're north of Chicago and close to Lake MI,
but surrounding them are a lot of fruit farms with migrant
workers. And they did a very intensive migrant children's
education program. They're wrapping up and they did great.
That's awesome.
OK. Texas has, well, we had a couple of other items too, but
they said Texas was the best one. So I guess I'm the best one
to talk about. We were able to get a work, a library consultant
position for workforce development only and we have
used that with state funds and federal funds. We have built a
collaboration relationship with our Texas Workforce Commission
to train the trainer for libraries.
In locally and to train patrons of those libraries as well.
Thanks.
And if I mean if you had time to count as a as the data lady, I'd
love to hear numbers.
Like how did you get 5/10/15?
Well, we kind of struggled for a little bit.
But I I think we all had similar workforce development grants
for.
Migrant populations and reaching those populations Mobileye. So
in California we had one specifically in Santa Cruz area
which did really well and they had some technology devices they
were they were able to provide for that community and help with
job searching space. Successful, cool.
Ohh, online.
Well, that was fun, let me tell you, we had a lot of.
Thanks.
We had some really interesting thoughts and projects, but we
landed on reentry resources and that was out of Nebraska.
I'm seeing a theme start to emerge here.
Over here.
Alright. We didn't get through very many examples before the
time was up. So I think we counted maybe 4, but there's
probably more. And then we decided the most unique was from
Washington, yeah, where they have a program for FAFSA.
But maybe you should explain, yeah, we have a pilot program
right now to increase FAFSA completion in the school
districts with the lowest rate of completion currently and it's
grants to libraries to partner with community based
organizations to increase that completion rate in their
community. Very cool.
Dennis, you wanna go with this table?
Thank you. At our table we talked about a a program in Ohio
where a library was using grant funds to pilot a program where
they're using virtual reality headsets to do skills training
and trades training for for people that working with the
company. They could use the the headsets to do traditional
training but use the virtual reality model which we think
could be, could be.
It could be big.
That's cool.
We're here.
So we talked about I think we had maybe like 5 or 6 just in
general we were talking about one of the things that.
We talked about was the database that we have is like the job and
career accelerator that we put out there that uses state and
federal funds. And then Natalie here, it happened to be this
morning she got an e-mail from one of our sub grants where they
did a senior graduation for one of their computer programs. So
she's got the pretty picture where they have all their
graduation stuff. So senior like over. Well, it's for computers.
It was computer learning. So yes, was it the older?
Senior citizen, yeah. So it's like she got the pictures
actually today, so it was interesting.
Pussey.
Alright dude, let's go back to.
No.
Have they done it? No, they haven't.
OK. So we came up with about 5 databases, learning platforms,
senior digital literacy, hotspot lending, you know all that good
stuff and our unique which is it because Ohio's doing it project
was VR for teens, so that the teens can practice with
different tools and so forth and you know practice interviewing
virtually. So that was our project. Thank you. Alright, we
have over here.
Actor hi.
When one of the.
Puerto Rico and Departamento Casium TNM project to the
lecture.
From you.
Impact and.
The baharak also.
So what are they micro?
Good morning, Puerto Rico Department of Education. Since
the pandemic, we have a reading program that has impacted 20% of
students low income students.
81.
Yes, I would.
Ohh and mid, low and middle income.
Yeah, yeah. Vamos.
Impact ammo.
Puerto Rico Kenya. No Cassie kenyetta. Escuelas in Puerto
Rico.
Yeah, yeah.
In the lecture.
So we've had the reader, the reading program for our project
for about two years and it has had an impact on over 500
schools in Puerto Rico. That's great. Thank you, gracias. Let's
do.
So we had maybe 4 ideas at our table, and.
North Carolina and Missouri actually have the same program
going on. We are partnering with different people, so working
with Excel High School which will.
What students go through the program they will grant a high
school equivalent diploma as opposed to a GED. Missouri is
partnering with their Department of Education, North Carolina, or
partnering with Department of Corrections to get justice
involved into individuals as they come out of the system to
help them get their degrees. Wonderful. Thank you.
We have two tables left. Hello. OK, I found the website. So
Pennsylvania is has a thing called skill up PA and I'm going
to read it to you, it says. Skilla. PA is designed to help
the Commonwealth build with a workforce ecosystem that
supports positive economic development. Job seekers can
explore career pathways, view local job postings and register
for free online learning and receive workforce services.
So these are so this is All in all Pennsylvania libraries as
well as with other other in Pennsylvania to try to build up
the workforce. It is partnering with grilling career link and it
is a state initiative and we came up with six other things.
OK, wonderful. Thank you. And I think this is our last table.
Did we miss anyone else?
So I have to say in Maryland, we we spend a lot of money on
library development, not so much on workforce development. So
what we do fund is primarily databases that are offered
statewide things that offer test prep for the SAT's Tech
certifications, Petersons Niesha Academy. But I also want to
mention that Baltimore City and Enoch Pratt Free Library system
in Baltimore City.
They've been really pushing high school completion and that's one
of the big programs that has been most successful in
Maryland. Thank you.
OK. Thank you, everybody. I appreciate your willingness to
do a speed challenge this early in the morning. Just as a
reminder, deadlines always exist when you work with the federal
government. These are your cycle deadlines for coming up with
your awards and I know we'll go over them again many times
between now and.
Eternity.
We are going to take a 15 minute break. Thank you for your
brevity. We will. That would put us back here right at 10:30.
I would love to chat.
Hello to those of you tuned back in. I'm going to give us a
gentle.
Recovery into the room and into the virtual room while I
introduce our next speaker.
Many of you are probably right in the thick of SPR reporting
since we have so many extensions this year, which means that our
program officers, our three program officers Cindy and
Dennis and Madison are also in the thick of reading the SPR
reports. And you may or may not know that they meet regularly to
compare notes and make sure that the feedback that they're
sending back to you is consistent across all the
portfolios.
And they take a lot of effort to get things right and to read and
to absorb all the things, all the exciting impacts that you're
writing about in addition to the suggested tweaks. So this think
of this session as a peek under the ILS hood of that process.
And it's going to be led by one of the program officers, Madison
Bowles, who's been with IMS for eight years and she's been a
grants to states program officer for five.
She has, I think, remarkably put new energized effort into the
reading of the SPR's every year. She really like, reinvents her
energy for this every year, which I think is a wonderful
sign. And you know, it involves somewhat monotonous reading and
sending back of messaging to you. But she really she brings
all of her heart and soul to this work, among so many other
things. So get ready for some helpful insights.
From Madison.
Hi everybody. Welcome. Great to see all of you. BM benitos. As
Terry mentioned, we are slowly as program officers looking over
the SPR as projects come in and and while we typically provide
more mechanical insights at our SPR refresher trainings, this
one is going to be a little broader in scope and a little
more generalized and overall what we want to cover.
Is that the SPR is more than just a compliance tool and I
know some of some of that is the farthest from your mind when you
have a looming deadline. But we want you to use the SPR as a
demonstration of how you spend your funds and the value that
you bring to the grants, the states program. So we just have
a little insight of what we're seeing so far.
So overall today, we're going to be talking a little bit of
optics.
In terms of how your reports are are viewed and received, a
general reporting components allowable costs which is always
an Evergreen topic and the state profile pages that Terry
mentioned previously.
So optics. When we say optics, we mean how you spend your funds
will be scrutinized and interpreted in many different
ways. We all have heard the different news headlines and
probably our own personal stories about how libraries are
becoming part of the culture wars and budgets are being
contentiously scrutinized all the time on Congress, in
Congress. So how we spend federal funds is important.
And since our SPR reporting is the record of how we do that, we
want to make sure that you convey your reports in a really
useful and valuable way. I know this sort of feels like a Big
Brother is watching you, or in the context of the Emerald City,
the great and powerful Oz is watching you. But you as LSA
coordinators are the ones who are great and powerful, and we
know that you could convey the value of the great work that
you're already doing.
So this is worth a reminder that your program projects in the SPR
are public facing information. Once they are submitted and
reviewed and approved by the program officer, they are moved
to the public SPR site and you can see the link on the slide as
well as a screenshot of what a project may look like. We
encourage you to take a look at your projects on this public
facing site, the only information that's not in the
SPR public view.
They are the budget details and the upload additional materials.
Everything else is public, but even though that budget
information and the additional materials are subject to Freedom
of Information Act requests, so they are available to the public
at any given time.
Now, allowable costs. We get more questions on allowable
costs probably than anything, and they are seemingly the most
obvious actions and how you spend your funds. When it comes
to optics with allowable costs, context matters. Many of us have
already learned that allowable costs rules are never
one-size-fits-all, so it's important to justify the costs
in writing when you're formulating your projects and
you're reviewing those.
Award applications and make sure that you apply your reasoning
consistently across all of your projects, whether it's match or
federal funds. Now here we have a list of components that make
up a solid cost justification. Now in this case, to get to the
Emerald City you have to follow the yellow brick road and to do
that you must have a solid cost justification. So the first are
program, statute and program regulations.
Those are things like the LSA program, the IMS Statute, all of
that information is on our website. We also have the grant
agreement, so you're aware documentation, the grants, the
States manual, the, the official, what we call an OEM or
official award notification is that piece of paper PDF, if you
will, that you receive when we issue those awards. But then we
have the cost principles, which I'm sure you all have tried to
look through.
Many times there are federal, they're the same across the
federal government when it comes to grant making two CFR 200.
Those set up a general baseline of of how we are allowed to
spend our funds no matter who is spending the federal funds. And
then there are administrative and legal decisions around how
funds are spent, what costs can be allowable, as well as any
sort of guidance documents that we may provide at any given
moment including.
What we provide at this at this level of conference and then
there are things like existing cases, precedent and prior
approval. Has another state done a project similar to the one
you're looking at? Have you talked to your program officer
about the costs that may be involved and what their take is
and whether or not it's allowable? Oftentimes we we get
information and wisdom from our colleagues and other offices
that MLS such as our grants management office and.
Of our general counsel to make sure we are applying things
consistently. So please always come talk to us if you have
questions.
And then finally, the rationale which really can can fall into
any of these topics, which is how how does this specific cost
or idea serve your program or project? Is it reasonable and
necessary? I'm sure you've heard us say that ad nauseam, but it's
worth considering those things and whether or not it has a
programmatic purpose when you're formulating how you're going to
spend your federal funds now, the more components you have
here, the more solid your cost.
Justification is, and as I mentioned earlier, it's really
important to be consistent across all of your funding and
keep the document documentation thorough and consistent as well.
Now you may hear and and Terry mentioned it earlier today that
we read each and every project that you submit in the SPR and
I'm looking at all of your you states who submit 150 plus
projects every year especially during these arpa's times. Now
Cindy who's recently crossed over from being a coordinator to
being a program officer can tell you that we do read every single
project.
We read them thoroughly and we look to see if the project
accurately reflects all the wonderful work that we know
you're doing throughout the year. We want the language and
the reporting data to be consistent, correct and legal.
The budget area is a place where where it's it's a great
opportunity to accurately reflect what you are spending
on. For example, on the slide we have up, if a narrative
indicates that.
Two staff members participated in the project, but the budget
reflects salary costs for .75 FTE that could be interpreted as
a discrepancy.
If the activity details and the other example on the right, if
the activity details, it indicate 2500 print books,
excuse me, 2523 print books, 422 e-books and 25 audio books were
purchased which adds up to 29170 items. But you only indicated
that 2900 items were were in the budget. That is a discrepancy,
so please be sure that the narrative and the budget are
connected.
And tell the same story.
We also would like you to be specific, especially with these
art projects we feel you guys on. You don't even know how many
masks you bought.
But but using using not descriptive words like other or
supplies is not helpful for us or anyone who reads the
projects. But so please be sure to be consistent in terms of
what you purchased.
So look how data the SPR gives you options for reporting
activity, local data. And we want you to understand the
implications of these choices that you make which are as I
mentioned visible to the public and feed data visualizations on
the IRS website. Ideally speaking I am LS would prefer to
know the name and address of institutions that participated,
benefited, attended etcetera your projects and.
This is the option on the left side of the screen. We also get
requests from Congress to identify projects in a
particular area or Congressional District. So this is this more
detailed information is really helpful to us when we get those
kite types of requests and we pull them right from the SPR.
Now for example, if an SLA awarded 10 libraries in STL SA
funds to support connectivity, you could report this higher
level data, excuse me, higher level detail by selecting the
name of those 10 institutions in the local section of the
activity. Now assuming that these institutions are already
listed in the sub sub recipient area of the SPR and you can
always go in and add new ones and you don't have to type out
the address information every single time. Now alternatively
we understand that.
Projects. They may not be statewide, but they do benefit
hundreds of libraries in your area you can include.
The number the number next to the institution type.
This is illustrated on the right side of the screen, but we want
you to know that the higher level of detail in this area can
reap the benefits down the line.
So project outcomes and lessons learned, these project outcomes
in each project you have a question, we'll take questions
at the end. Thank you.
Thank you. India. Project outcomes are the open-ended
fields near the end of each project and they allow you to
share lessons learned. Program officers, as we've been reading
projects recently, haven't seen a recent downward trend in
filling out the project outcome section. Now please know that
these text boxes.
If they are left empty, we have no way of knowing if the SLA's
are deliberately omitting information, accidentally
including what they're supposed to be typing in there. Or maybe
the wicked witch dropped a house on you. We don't. We have no
idea.
But you might and and we understand that sometimes these
boxes may not be directly applicable to the project at
hand. However, you might be able to glean some content to fill in
there from your subrecipient applications. Or if it is a
statewide project and it's a solid program, we totally
understand. But we can't read minds. We don't know what type
of outcomes are coming from these projects. We are not
professional Professor Marvel.
To give another shout out, so please put some some information
in these text boxes. It's super helpful for us.
Now Terry already mentioned the state profile page refresh and
many of you collaborated with us to help update these pages. As
each state has its own profile on the IM list website, we
updated them to reflect the new five year plan information, the
evaluation information and new projects. We've also included
updated Chief Officer Headshots and quotes. So feel free to go
check them out. We're really proud of them and we're really
appreciated of your work of helping them us refresh those.
And there is a screenshot here of what that looks like. Thank
you Mississippi for for being our visual cue. Here we have a
nice quote from the chief as well as the project examples
with some really great photographs.
That was really quick. But overall we want to to let you
guys know that what you submit in these in the SPR and how you
really your projects to us matters. And we already know
you're doing great work and we just want to make sure that that
is conveyed, the value of those projects is conveyed to not just
to your program officers but to the United States for large. I
know there are questions. Hey, do you have a question?
Yeah, yeah. Yes, please.
Isabel.
The attachments. So my, my folks love Sharon using that
attachment section and they almost always attach like the
200 list of folks that participate in their programs as
attachment because it's it's just too much capacity. We can't
add each one. Is that helpful or we've talked about that. Yes.
And it is helpful if if you, if it's too laborious to include
the local data and each activity you can, but you have that.
List it exists, you can upload that as an attachment.
In the additional material section of the project, we will
see it. We will make note of it. Thank you for pointing that out.
Yes, good job, Madison. I have two questions over here. Great.
OK, great. The second question, I'm going to stick with the
attachments. Some of this is coming from Rachel Cook in Utah.
Some of our additional materials are really impressive or provide
helpful context. Will there ever be an option to have them show
up public facing?
And our next session is about the future of the SPR. So we're
going to, we're going to parking lot that for the next session.
Great. Thank you, Rachel. And our first question, let me
scroll back up is from Karen Egan. She has a question on the
locales when possible, do you want this down to the building
level? This is such a caring Egan question. I love the
detail, the attention to detail. Karen Egan for example, the
grant is awarded to Chicago Public Library.
Which has 81 branches, but the project was only held at a
particular branch, so this location lists that branch and
the and the address question.
But we're getting Terry.
The SP.
Preloaded PLSS data at the system level, so that would be
the Chicago Public Library level. So that is sort of our
baseline understanding of what you're uploading. If you want to
upload your individual branches, we're not going to stop you, but
it is not required.
Thank you, Karen.
You know how we're doing on time.
All right. No other questions. Thank you all so much. Muchas
gracias.
I'd like to call my two colleagues up to the dais
please, sweetheart and Matt as we get started. Madison gave us
a wonderful kind of flyby SPR peek under the hood and we're
thinking of this next session as a little bit more of a deep dive
into things that we could take from you and consider as we
think about making iterative improvements to the SPR, so.
Umm.
We have two colleagues from IMLS joining us for this next
section. Many of you know Matt Birnbaum here in the middle.
He is now the director of the value of research and evaluation
at IMS, and he's been working with you longer than I have.
Specifically, Karen Reese and Debbie in Arkansas and Jamie and
Arizona worked with Matt over 10 years ago to start brainstorming
about the future of the SPR and help architecting the system
that we use today, which is no small feat.
In addition to helping establish that evaluative framework, which
is amazing and all the other things that Matt does, I think
the most amazing thing about Matt is that he's super
approachable and wonderful. He's a wonderful fed. Like you
couldn't get a better fed than Matt Bernbaum. So he's really
interested in listening and learning from all of you and
he's going to do the majority of our presenting here today. But
first, I want to introduce a second MLS colleague who is
brand new to this.
Community, but not to the SPR, because he's been helping us for
years. So sweet, dark Hazarajat you has been our acting CIO at
times, and at the moment he is our senior IT program manager at
IMS. He helped us when we moved the SPR to cloud migration
behind the scenes. That was a critical moment for the program,
whether you know it or not. And he's also been working on the
visualization data that now goes from the SPR into theirs.gov.
Website. He's constantly asking us really good questions about
the SPR and we said why don't you just come with us to Seattle
so you can hear from all of the people who are actually using
it. And he did. So we're so thrilled he's here and you're
going to be hearing from him as well. But I would like to start
this off by turning it over to Matt.
Everybody, it's so wonderful to be here.
13 years ago when I first joined MLS.
There was some of you.
Got to be with me in Baltimore, my first meeting and we started
a strategic planning exercise and the question we wanted to
say to ourselves how, how does a reading program in Michigan
compared to one in Mississippi using federal funds, what does
that look like and as we look what the reporting was like back
then?
We didn't have the tools to do that, so consequently we were
handicapping ourselves and trying to tell a story about the
difference that reading programs make, the ways that they
function and vary the things that are similar.
And the importance of that little bit of federal dollars to
helping make that contribution?
So we then spent.
Bit of time.
Working through got some some smart people like shridar.
To help us with the architect, and a lot of you worked with
some some folks who had my skills and it was a real team
collaboration using the expertise of the folks like you
in library science, the expertise of the information
engineers, and some of the cloudy, vague social science
folks like myself to work together and to build out the
system.
And it's always been based on trying to accommodate different
needs, trying to make sure that the federal policy makers.
Who have to be accountable? Taxpayer dollars can have some
good assurances that the dollars are being spent really well.
It's also being to ensure that all of you can be benchmarking.
Yourselves overtime as well as each other to start thinking
about what's going on. What can I learn from? And so we're at
this point now where a decade later.
We don't quite want to do all that crazy lifting we did a
decade ago.
But let's look at the system in terms of what really works well.
What might be able to work a little bit better, and in doing
so, we're really introducing you to three dorks. He's going to be
the the main architect, but Terry and I, Terry says really
sweet things about me. But Terry's like my favorite
colleague because I know that she is so considerate and so
respectful, and she is such an active listener.
And when she says Matt, I think this is a good opportunity for
us to work together.
I'm going to be really excited and we're really happy to be
here. So this is kind of the overview we'll do Terry and I
will present a little bit in the beginning and then we're going
to have some questions for you and we're going to really be
starting a conversation.
Where we're going to be listening. No action, but we'll
be coming back later in the fall with some reflections.
OK, so a little bit.
Big picture. So decade ago we were post Baltimore, we were
probably in Nashville, can't remember where. Saint Louis,
Kansas City, Milwaukee. And we're building out the system
and we've got 15 states.
Who are the ones who are piloting it? Michigan, Illinois,
Arkansas, all these great folks that I know some of them are
here today. Arizona. And then we were looking at what public
libraries sociation. Emily, before she was working with Mrs.
Who's my counterpart at PLA, and she was heading the project
outcome.
And we started to align our outcome reporting with project
outcomes that the public libraries didn't have to do 2
separate things. It was something identical.
And then as Terry was mentioning, we behind the scenes
we had variants of cerebral and we started moving this to a
cloud migration and now we've been in the steady state.
And we've got some really great national data, but what can we
do to do a little bit better to make your lives a little bit
easier in terms of your compliance work?
Is also to be able to do some better improvement in learning.
So a little bit of an example. Here's you know, the way we
built the system that we used to tell the stories and when we
were what the heck is this estimates grant data do.
Oh well, we give the states some money for them to use in their
territories.
They're going to be doing something like maybe building up
their infrastructure, the capacity. Maybe it's about doing
lifelong learning. Maybe it's about.
Human Services, civic engagement, economic
development, and we started breaking those out into 13
separate intents.
And that's just the way every project is based on this uniform
common thing that, however, might differ in Iowa compared
to.
New Mexico compared to Maine?
It was all based on what the intentionality was in terms of
making some.
Person in one of these public libraries across the country
lives a little bit better.
And then we started thinking that, well, not only what's the
outcome, what's the intent?
But how can we better describe it? So the first part was where
some of these places that might be one small community, another
might be statewide.
So we all started looking at ways practically to start
describing what those locales where the activity was going and
then looking at the beneficiaries. Was it some part
of the library workforce or was it a part of the public and it
was a public, was it the broad general public? It wasn't really
targeted to some specific population? And if so, we can
get pretty precise.
So these were some examples of what the system was and then
administratively trying to make it a little bit better and
easier for all of us, all of you to use the data to improve your
administrative decisions, any planning, any policy
conversations. So we started doing these data pulls. It's a
kind of wicked wild data set. So we made it a little bit easier
to pull out the Excel spreadsheets to give to your
evaluators or possibly your cells.
There's some work with the automatic default to draft
status to make it easier for when you're doing your reporting
every year.
And then saving the active scenes, active screens. And now
we're starting to look at maybe over the next three or so years,
we do some much more incremental but important enhancements that
would make it a little bit better for yourselves, for
policymakers who are looking for the data, for the libraries
themselves and for the citizens who are using those services.
Principles, just same way it's always been. This is truly a
partnership, Terry and her team and all of you. I always love
coming here because there's such great mutual respect and
admiration and consideration for what everybody does, and it'll
be that same way going forward. Scatter work for IMS, it's got
to work for the States and territories.
So to do that, we're going to rely on your active
participation and input. It's not going to be, even if street
art is really bright.
Your folks and your knowledge collectively is much brighter
and it's going to be what's going to be driving the system.
Some of the improvements will particularly help all of you,
and some might help I am a last self, but we'll be transparent
about all of that.
And we're going to try to do it in a way which is going to be
respectful of the actual rural demand you have. We know that
we're in the beginning of a five year planning cycle and the
first three years is what's used for the evaluation. So we're not
going to do any big heavy lifts during those three years of
reporting. We'll try to time that right.
OK, so some potential facets of work and everything's on the
table, but when Terry's team and my team began talking about this
a couple months ago, there were just some of the big buckets.
And we bought St. area, can we?
Update the look and feel of when you actually log on to the SBR.
What are some ways we can make that user interface a little bit
better?
Is there behind the scenes? What you folks may not know is Terry
and her team spent a ridiculous amount of time doing manual
labor to get the SPR to integrate to the larger grant
reporting system that I am less reporting called the GMs. So
we're going to be looking at some ways maybe to streamline
that, make it automatic so that the staff themselves don't have
to spend so much of their manual time doing this work.
Trying to find some better ways of the data that we're
collecting it making it more useful for all of you to use in
your decisions. Maybe it's some improvements for data
visualizations, trend analysis, maybe it might be some better
work using some narrative keyword searches. Lots of ways.
And today's focus though, is really understanding what the
experience is like for each of you. Everything, every design
step going forward is going to be based on your experience as a
user.
So Terry, I think I'm going to turn it over to you. And it's
kind of like work it through through what the user sees.
We realized that not all of you might have shown up today with
the SPR in your mind, so we're going to give you a visual flyby
to just refresh us all on what we're talking about. Here's the
login screen.
You go in. If you're an LTA coordinator, you're probably
adding a project. You could be copying or continuing a project
from a prior year. There are some options here.
Once you get to the ADA project page, there's some initial
fields you're filling out. You're giving it a title and
abstract, telling us who the director and the grantee are.
We've got those additional materials that Hadia was talking
about and lots of budget information. This is one of
those fields that Madison mentioned. Actually, both of
these fields not in the public view.
This is the controlled vocabulary kind of section of
the SPR, where we're asking you to pick one of the 14 intents
that roll up to those six focal areas that Matt was talking
about earlier. Plus we ask you to add up to two subjects, which
are subsets of different library areas that you could be working
on. So this vocabulary is set in the system.
We go into, you know, every project has a big umbrella and
then there's little activities below it. And so we ask you to
fill out activity titles and abstracts as well.
The activity specifically has what we call modes and formats
and quantities. Oh my, and we know that this has been a
traditional pain point for some of you and interpreting. You
know what? What are we really looking for here as I am a LS?
We ask you to get down to the activity beneficiaries. If it's
not the general public or the library workforce, you know, are
you looking to target certain populations with certain
projects?
Madison talked through the activity locale options. I just
lay it out again as something that we've traditionally give
you some choices around, but these choices have influence on
what shows up on our website then. And so we're here to kind
of talk about you know, trade-offs in that information.
The project Outcomes area is open text, so if there are think
really good important impacts that you haven't already talked
about, we want to hear them in this section.
We also have a way for you to tag a project as exemplary,
which really helps us when we're asked to call like some
highlights of the program for the year. And you can use
open-ended language to give us additional project tags that
might be helpful for you to track and it's also sometimes
helpful for us to track.
And then you get to the project status area, where you're
completing the project, saving the project, saving and
continuing and saving and saving, because we know that's a
pain point in the SPR as well. And then you eventually generate
a project list and all your money magically rolls up into
these projects. And then you go to validate and there's these
error messages. So you're not alone. Everybody gets these, and
then you save and you're done so.
Fly by. I'm going to hand it back to Matt as we talk about
what's next.
OK. First principle, we're just starting the conversation today.
We've got 10 questions. We'll take the rest of the session to
try to get some feedback about those.
Try to make sure everyone has a chance to participate if you
want, but there'll be more time. This is going to be, we're going
to be trying to collect this information over the summer so
that by the fall we might be have a more informed
deliberation about next steps. So these are the questions and
we're going to break them out into a little bit.
So walk us through your use of the SPR through the year.
What's working well and meeting your needs and what are the pain
points? I'm going to shut up for about 30 seconds and then we'll
take a couple of couple hands. You all have some post it notes
on your table if you can just take those and just start
scribbling.
Terry, Streeter and I, we're going to collect those at the
end. So anything that we don't get in addition to the
conversation, we've got it and it will help us as we start
collecting data and analyzing it going forward.
OK, so I'm going to shut up. Maybe just 30 seconds, then
we'll take some hands on this first question.
So, you know, as the elder, my memory gets bad and my
eyesight's really bad. So I'm just going to be calling on
people. And I probably know you and I forget I just asked for
apologies from. But can somebody please someone want to raise
their hand and get us get the conversation going? Go ahead,
Jamie.
Never thought I'd get to say this. Thank you for the data
export.
So that's something that works well. The thing that right now
I'm having a pain point about is a safe way for subrecipients to
enter data directly. I worry because it's based on library
system and they don't have individual accounts.
So I'm just going to repeat that, the issue of trying to
have Subrecipients report directly, how do you manage
that? It's kind of a challenge.
Somebody else.
This.
Hey, I just. I guess my one of my big requests is I look at the
SPR and I work with the SPR all the time, pretty much all year
round. However, like the state librarian, not so much. She only
looks at it once a year. Maybe there could be better prompts
for how to certify stuff. And that's PR that that was my pain
point.
Sorry, your name again is.
Mary Raby, Maryland State library. Thank you. Thank you.
Somebody else please.
Thanks.
I have lots of ideas.
Thank you.
As someone new working with the program, I found the reports
really helpful to look at to see what our agency has been doing
over the last couple of years. I know I've had other new
employees also reading through the past reports and it's a
place where that data is summarized and we don't really
have any other locations where that information is altogether
in one place. So really, really helpful for our own staff to
use.
Thank you. Your name again is.
From the Idaho.
OK, lots of ideas person.
Ohh, you want? Yeah of course.
Talking about you like, I'll give you 2.
You get things you like. Are things that are challenges
either way, OK?
That I have control.
Because control is a good thing with the SPR and getting data.
What I would like, I think initially with working with new
people entering in data to the SPR that the health techs be
more human focused.
Thank you.
Because I'm generous, I'll take one more comment before I move
to the next one.
Matt, we have a couple virtual, please. OK, great.
In the activities for content and acquisition, it would be
great to add counts for supplies, materials purchased.
This is Rachel Cook from Utah. He's a smarty pants. I have had
libraries pay for or pay for lots of things recently. We pay
for lots of children's programming in the pandemic and
those supplies can be reported in counts. If I should be
reporting it differently, just let me know.
And then I have a couple, so just bear with me. One request
from Jeanette and Vermont is to it would be helpful, she says,
if the numbers we enter into the open text box within the budget
section.
Basically auto populate.
And then, Shannon furlough, a pain point for us is how to
translate outputs into something that we can show more widely,
what my staff said that we report on, on such a way that
doesn't really feel it accurately reflects on what we
do. How can we change that narrative? Thanks so much,
Cindy. These are all great.
Next question.
What does pre SPR info gathering look like and does it involve
other systems? What's working well or not?
Just gonna give you a 30 seconds. Take those posts and
we'll start the conversation all the way. We'll and we'll start
all the way back to that end table when we're ready.
And please do post stuff on those posted things. We'll
collect it.
This is a great question. I was trying to ponder just how far
behind I was on the SPR recently and I was trying to chunk up
time and I think the pre planning is about 20%.
I have essentially an Excel planning budget because I force
everyone to send all of their charges through me sub grants or
or statewide projects and then per project it's all tabbed out
and I have every charge. So then I make a chart that is project
overview activities, project overview activities and I fit
all the charges in until I'm done with all of the money and
then I turn around and tell the other staff all right?
This is where your expenditures were. So this is the report you
have to turn in and I turn them back to a Google form.
That matches the SPR.
So yeah, my excel sheet, many spreadsheets, Google forms,
then, then to the SPR. Thanks Karen.
Thank you. Just gave us freedom. Lots of food for fodder.
Please, your name? Hi, I'm Nicola from Rhode Island. So we
do a lot of outlining and drafting in Word just basically.
And I'm wondering, I have gone through and kind of created a
template for all our projects based on what's in the SPR. But
is that something you might be able to provide so that we can
work on it outside of the system in a way that's a little more
user-friendly to the average?
Person, so that they can still answer all the questions,
including all of those like little questions that sometimes
we forget are going to be there. So I'll have my staff, they'll
do a whole report and then I'll go and be like, oh, I have five
questions that got triggered that I wasn't necessarily
expecting. So perhaps the template for that might be
useful.
Thank you.
Now I've got a couple virtuals again for Shannon furlough. My
departments gather statistic in such different ways that I have
to translate the SPR time. It would be nice if we could change
to use SPR questions year round and then in Florida we try to
synchronize our states annual reporting with the SPR's.
Having clean this is someone else, Alexandra from South
Carolina. Having a clean template to provide to others
would be really helpful. Everybody loves a good template
man.
Message is coming in clearly page three. Before we go to the
next question, just quick any quick brief summary things that
you're thinking about as you listen to the conversation
developing?
Yeah, sure. A couple of things I realized was.
The source data, right, one of the individuals talked about the
the templates to help them out that that's the key thing when
we were talking about the source systems and how we integrate
source systems with the SPR and SPR to the downstream like GMs.
That's the automation where like you know where 20% of the time
somebody said like you know the pre planning would take 20 to
30% of the time. How can we reduce that? If there is a way
to do that we would love to really work with you guys and
make that kind of a standard template.
And that will improve the efficiency. So that's one of the
key things that definitely we would love to work with you all.
Thanks, Rita.
Move to the next question.
Question four what works doesn't work well in terms of reporting
project level budgets?
Could we get it more fine-tuned for it? Not the project but an
activity? As a reminder, every project has at least one
activity.
I'm just the messenger.
Where did you give me like 3015? Thirty seconds? I'll start the
conversation.
You want to.
Someone please please an old friend.
When we first started doing the SPR, when you first came on
board and Arkansas was a pilot project, that was the goal was
activity level. And as we started working on it, I think
we found that that was not attainable. And so we kind of
drew back from that and I think that's still the case, the
activity level at our state.
You know, the way we do our finances and budgeting at the
state level, that would require a large.
Burden on us and coding and accounting principles and stuff
like that. So I would say activity level may not be the
best way to go.
Good to see you.
So, Carmen, North Dakota, new new fiscal director.
And I'm relatively new and LSA as well. So we're working
together and our fiscal director really wants the budget to be
set up.
Aligning with a five year plan so that all of our money then is
put into projects. So what I see is 29 projects for the upcoming
years and so it'll all be coded according, every expense will be
quoted according to those projects and that is how she
would like it and I think that's kind of what.
You are asking for, but it's probably not quite at the
activity level.
In the project.
Thank you.
Not the virtual folks are saying thanks, but no thanks.
Imagine that I just wanted to jump on so much of our LTA funds
support staff time because we are a very small state and we do
have a very activity level, sort of very complicated reporting
structure that we do for our time. But even with that with
and again we're very small, it's very difficult to get staff to
consistently and correctly report their time in a way that
genuinely accurately reflects things.
At an activity level, I think we managed to kind of capture all
of the project level. So I I love project level. I'm pro
keeping it. Thank you.
Carmen, North Dakota, once again, I did not remember that
yes, this is going to require our staff to basically do time
cards and that we do find that to be a potential problem.
However, we have not given up on that vote.
Thank you.
Just another scenario for our federal projects. Each project
has its own code and that code is set up in June of each
previous year and we start our new projects in October with our
federal funds. Our coding is set up in June if at some point
there is a new activity.
That comes about starting in October. There would be no
coding for it and no way to track it by the activity level
because we've already set up the coding the previous gene, what's
your state's fiscal year beginning July, this July, June,
July, June?
Move to the next one.
What works and doesn't work in terms of controlled vocabulary
like we use for subjects? Think we have 32 subject codes and
then we give you. You can use select up to two subjects and
then you can enter your additional keywords, your own
tags and we give you a chance to add up to three tags.
So when you think about.
The control valve locally for subjects, tags, what works and
what doesn't work. What can be improved?
So these tags are a thing. All right. So I've been like every
other state, building templates and things like that.
Pennsylvania by the way. Hey, how you doing? And with the
tags, I feel like we have been submitting enough reports in the
SPR. Is there a way to pull those tags to then compile? Like
sort of like a starting list so that we can hit a drop down box
or check box instead of typing in these tags every single time?
Because open text fields when you're trying to like analyze
that data is a nightmare and so that would be helpful. And also
with data entering and that would help my advisors with.
Those little things in life, you know So what 11 lesson I learned
in advancing and I am a lessons to hire really smart people,
people smarter than me like Emily. And then we we used to
have a statistician Lisa that came here and those of you
remember Lisa. Lisa should take these keyword tags and really
start helping doing this analysis. We want to see what
was the investment return on investment for early literacy or
digital literacy. We were using those tags that's something we
can definitely.
Follow up with you on.
Thanks.
Matt.
We have a request with what I'm going to go with as a an update
of the tags themselves, some things that may be more
intuitive, like Wi-Fi, something more direct and.
Instinctive as far as what's being used or utilized by end
users or libraries.
Thanks.
OK.
Let's go backwards, then.
Sorry, no, please. Wi-Fi on the tags from what state, South
Carolina?
If you did have drop downs but still have the option of open
fields because when something new happens you want to be able
to still report it. Thanks Wendy.
What works doesn't work well in terms of reporting project level
that we did this. I'm not going back there.
What works doesn't work well in terms of current locale
flexibility, reporting by institution, details of just a
number. Sometimes I'm I'm less can't convey the true reach of
the program without geolocation data. Some background. This is
going to be the elder speaking up. So 10 to 13 years ago, when
we were first trying to build this system, we knew that some
projects were the SLA.
Is doing for its entire territory, like entire state.
Sometimes it was being sub granted to a recipient that was
covering maybe just one community and then we had these
weird things in between. Or maybe it was all the big cities
or all the small rural towns, or maybe just part of a state and
we didn't have a way to.
Capture that. So we created a proxy of locale, like the number
of school libraries, for instance, and this is kind of
the way we've been going. So as you look at this question here,
we've got some maps.
To try to show you where we're at right now for some of the
states when we create a hypothetical of W Dakota, let's
assume that W Dakota.
Only they don't do any subrecipients and so everything
that shows up is forever. That's capital for the SLA's located.
And if we try to try to visualize and share it with
congressional people or whoever, it's going to be looking like
all that state state is just concentrated, right? With a
state capitalist. Now you picture that to the left. Here's
an opportunity where some state is giving us voluntarily a
little bit more detail about those locales where it's
captured so we can get a better sense of the reach of the
investment in that state. But it's a work in progress. So as
you think about this.
What works and doesn't work and your ability to tell stories
about where the SLA dollars are going in your territory.
It's about.
My extra work. Go for it.
So it's all with that humanistic approach, right? So I feel like
if there was an easier way to upload the locale data that you
would get more locale data. Right now it's that that manual
data entry and if you know all of us around like 20 million
hats, you'll know how it is. And so that's why that if there was
an easier way for data entry like uploading.
Thank you. How about a Congressional District?
Field.
Oh, I think you just made made a lot of fans with that comment,
Jamie.
And now I'm getting between you and lunch, I'm still going to
push you a little bit more.
North Dakota? Come on up.
Everybody's just trying to speak at the level at which I put the
mic, so I want to raise it because I'm uncomfortable for
them.
Seven question.
What SPR data is most useful to you year round and during the
five year evaluation? Great questions. So you know I think
about that five year evaluation, what was some of the data
elements that were really helpful or doing annual annual
reporting?
Take about 1530 seconds, then we'll start the conversation.
And I'm at the point now I'm going to voluntarily call on
people who I know are quiet. Who will they see me later. They're
going to pull my arm with their suggestions.
No.
What's it like in Missouri?
Come on up.
What we do use the SPR for some things. A lot of times we
collect as far as like new projects and that sort of thing
from conferences such as this or PLA or listening to other things
and then we go back to the SPR to get the data to move forward.
PS2 do you ever blend them?
Anyone with aspirations for the types of data storage you wish
we could be telling?
Matt Shannon furlough year round with surveys which I need my
staff to do more. Five year it was outputs to see overall
impact.
Thank you.
It's a tough crowd today. Maybe I'll give a, I'll do a proxy for
Colorado since they're the image on this slide. It's one of the
few states we saw that actually used the outcome survey data in
service to their five year evaluation. So shadow to Jean
who's online virtually and also just a question like can you see
yourselves using this data?
In the same way or is is the survey outcome data on a
different level for you?
And what could we do to potentially make it useful?
Pennsylvania, come on up.
No, no. You know what, it's really hard because you know we
are definitely evaluation and income, not income, but
data-driven. But with entering in the data we find ourselves
brightening up against.
Umm.
Give me the word.
When you when you're around like when you round up or round down
estimation estimations. And so when we actually get to the data
that we're putting in, our data is skewed because a lot of it
leads towards estimating. So then when my advisors are trying
to plan programs, it's not really creating the picture that
they want. So my advisors build their own data collection stuff
with their programs that we end up just uploading in the
attachments because the SPR doesn't really ask the
questions.
Capture what it is we find as useful. So however that could be
kind of melded or somewhere. It's hard dealing with all these
things. I think it's safe for me to say I'm speaking for straight
armed terrorists. It's safe. We would love to have any of those
stories, any of those tools that you're using in your state. That
would help us a lot.
Serena, do you have anything, any Internet goes back to my
initial readers where whatever the tools that you're using to
collect the data or to upload it to the SPR, if there is some
mechanism on your side, we would love to make that simpler by
automating the process. I mean, think of it as like you know,
the Excel spreadsheet that you maintain and automatically
adjust address PR and it automatically entered into EMS
and that's how all the three systems are integrated and
that's the vision.
I know there will be lots of things that we have to the
hurdles I would say, but I think we can do the work around and we
can make this a lot better. I mean do you lots of fewer stuff
like absolutely. Yeah, we need to talk for sure.
Yeah.
Please.
Catherine from North Carolina, the outcome data for us I think
is so at the activity level for a lot of our sub awards. So you
might have three activities and only one of them has required
survey. So just kind of reporting on that outcome level
data just for one part of the project isn't as beneficial for
us at the project level.
Yeah. That's an interesting one. Thank you sharing that.
Hector.
Yes, no practicando allergy or traverse me amigo.
Umm.
In Puerto Rico, at the open sando Trabajo al La Muffler
malaria.
And Microsoft Power apps.
But.
In Puerto Rico, we are considering creating a form
using Microsoft Power apps.
Looking for mineral?
OK, and we have a situation because the librarians.
Furnish their reports in Spanish to us.
Passava LSPR Salava Trejo quatro Dias Entre in Trello prieto.
Traducing elemento central aparte Financiera de Bella being
complicated so the the person in charge of uploading to the SPR
took like 3 days or more because they had to translate the forms,
enter them into the SDR and then after that go into the financial
area. So it gets really cumbersome.
Thank you. Thank you.
Matt Shannon from Georgia. I love the batch upload feature. I
wish I could do it for activities.
Thank you.
Next question.
Thinking about everything.
Including 10 minutes to lunch, what are your time investments?
Where are your time investments disproportionate to the payoff?
So where are the things that you're putting in a lot of time
to enter the data and it's just not giving you good bang for the
buck? Any particular pain points?
Jeff.
I'm I'm still relatively new at this but I think for me one of
the things that I've encountered giving out the the grants and
the projects is I'm only ever going to be as good as the
projects and the reports that I'm getting back from people. So
that's why the idea that a template that I can give people
and say here's what I need here's what it needs to look
like at the end that I can sort of seamlessly get into the SPR
so I'm not acting as a.
Translator for these things and they know what's expected, they
know what ultimately I'm going to be using. So like I said, the
just the realization that I'm only going to be as good as as
what I'm getting from the the project leads. Thank you, it's
great.
Come on.
All right. This is just more of an office.
Such change level validations. It isn't really about that, but
usually when I'm getting to the end and I'm adding adding things
in when I hit those errors. It'd be great if we had page level
validation if that was at all possible to help.
I have just, I think this might be more of an US problem in my
state than a you problem. But because we're spending so much
time getting this data ready, I always feel like I'm never. I
should be doing it now, planning for next year and ensuring that,
like everything we have is aligned to what's in there
instead of what our individual departments are creating. And I
just feel like I can never.
Quite get ahead of that so that the next report is really,
really meaningful to us in a way where we're not transforming
some of the data that our individual people are collecting
and then turning it into this. And again, I think it's an US
problem that I'm trying to work on, but it does seem like I can
never quite get there.
Thank you. No problem.
I think you're unique.
I have something that feels it may be an US problem as well,
but for me the actual difficulties with the SPR, I
completely agree with the you're only as good as your sub
grantees reports. That is true. And yet I'd almost rather work
with them than trying to get the data that I need from our
financial department. I don't know how many other states have
a real disconnect from the finance people versus them, but
I had a conversation with our CFO.
This year in which or past grant year where I kept going back and
saying OK, well you told me you sent spent it on Mussolini, they
can't report miscellany. What is that? And she finally said,
well, why? Why do you need to know that? And she had no idea
that we had a budget narrative to go with that because she
never looked at it. I think she thought I was just being super
annoying and trying to like make myself more important than I
was. And I had to say I MLS actually wants more than just
the numbers from you.
So if there was.
Any way to have like a, a list, something we could provide to
our business office here are the things that you need to be
tracking so that it's not just Angela really wants you to be
accountable to her even though you know, even though you're the
CFO and she's just doing this more. Angela is going to have to
go and justify this to her program officer and she would
really love it if you said we something more than we bought
stuff, so.
Angela, another one to make that many people happy here today.
You got a couple.
Matt Tamara from Oregon. One concept we wrestle with is deep
and narrow impact versus wide and shallow numbers seem to
speak to statewide impact. Sometimes an activity is only
for 15 libraries, but the impact is deep. It seems like we need
more in terms of context to really tell the story. Yeah,
they, they, they the investments reach so many people.
Absolutely.
I think we're moving to the last question. Beyond updating the
SBR, beyond the engineering of the system, is there anything
else we can do to help streamline or reduce the
administrative burden you have and those of your sub
recipients?
So putting aside the SPR, anything else we could do?
222-2222.
2222, OK.
One thing we could probably do because we have, I think all of
us have our own little tools.
In our own little pockets that could probably help somebody
else. You ask on one of the things on the SVR during the
outcomes is best practices or whatever. But I haven't we, I
don't think we've had a chance to a place where we can deposit
any of our tools and making up someone else. So like the
question about finances and activities, we don't even work,
we don't even ask finance to ask to do our activity level
activities. We have our sub recipients.
Give us that and we actually come through their receipts and
our request for funds, but we do have different procedures that
we've outlined that may help someone else that may or may not
be in our manual. But anyway, thanks, Erica.
So I'm going to turn it.
I'm going to just do a quick update and turn it to Terry. So
one of the things that's coming down the horizon is 3 hours been
working with the programmer and one of my team members who's a
data scientist. We've been working the piece of software
called Tableau to try to improve the ability to take the data
that's collecting SPR and to create into some types of apps
that you can all use for trying to tell some stories. So we
wanted to let you know that that's coming down the pipe but.
Terry, I think I want to turn it to you and wrapping us up for
starting to speed up.
Whatever you want to start from here. Either way, I'm fine.
This is the commitment.
All right.
Good morning, everyone.
Again, thank you so much for that great feedback. I mean this
is my first time here and super excited and thanks for the great
introduction you both. So just to introduce myself again, I'm a
Sridhar Kasiraja, senior IT program manager, O CI analyst.
So as we were talking about the features and the functions of
the SPR, I just want to pivot a little bit to the cyber security
aspect of it. Trust me, I mean I won't do more technical jargon
here, but I'll try to be as simple as possible.
So as you know, it's been the cyber threats have been
increasing so much lately. The federal government have issued
like you know more than 40 directives in the last 12 months
for us to beef up the whole security. We've been doing a lot
of these security initiatives and the background you may not
see them, but as one of the examples being the cloud, when
we move into the cloud, we moved the Gov cloud. So there are lots
of security.
Controls, we do. So recently a White House passed this issue,
that directive, it's called White House National
Cybersecurity Initiative. But there are like lots of things
that we have to do, which we have been doing. But one of the
things that matters here, the relevant to this context is the
multi factor authentication. I'm sorry, another acronym, sorry,
Sorry. Yeah, it's MFA. We call it again, this MFA is something
that's being mandated at this point of time for any of the
public systems.
Which requires authentication SPR being in the application
where you need to log in. So we have to make that a multi factor
authentication. So for many of you may already know what the
multi factor authentication is, right? I mean even the daily
life you have the banking applications where you log in
and there will be a code sent to your e-mail or text. So it's
pretty much that. And also if you're using other government
applications like EG MSMS, EMS or other applications, they do
use the solutions like login.gov.
So they provide both single sign on as well as the multi factor
authentication. So having said that, so our goal as part of the
future of this PR is to implement multi factor
authentication.
So other securities, as I said, you may not have direct impact
on you or the users in the system, but MFA definitely you
will see that impact because it's just it differs the way you
log into the system. But again our goal is to minimize the
impact negatively. So Terry, I'm working with Terry and Matt on
like you know, what are the solutions available. So we would
love to go with the solution that we are all familiar with
like login.gov but again there are certain logistics that we
have.
To have considered there lots of other factors, so as soon as we
make some decisions we will keep you posted on that and we will
give enough time for you guys to test it out, make sure
everything is smooth before we.
Thank you.
All right. So we're going to take everything we heard and
actually if you have sticky notes, I am going to leave right
after this to go to the talking book library. So maybe put your
sticky notes, if you would, at the Cindy Laura table. We can
just make like a big brick of sticky notes that we take back
with us to MLS. We're so interested in continuing this
conversation and mulling over what.
Heard today and continuing to get your input.
Thank you. To my colleagues. We're not actually going to have
time for questions, but we have the parking lot, so that's what
that's for.
One quick note before lunch break and I see many presents on
the back. If you want to be part of that state networking
activity and have a gift, make sure it's there by the end of
lunch at the table in the back of the room. If you want to walk
with me to the talking book and Braille Library, I'm going to
make a beeline out to the registration table countdown
clock of like 30 seconds and then I'm going to take off. But
you can also get there on your own. It's about a 20 minute walk
and it's kind of just straight down. If you can get to 8th Ave.
from here, it's it's basically a straight shot.
So we'll be back at 1:15 Pacific Time. Lunch is on your own.
There are ideas in your packet if you haven't seen them
already. And we'll hear about ARPA highlights at lunch, so you
after lunch, so you want to be sure you'll be back in time.
Thank you, everyone.