So I have the unenviable task of closing today, keeping between you and the door is me at
this point, or the airport, or whatever it may be, but I did want to make just a few
final comments.
First is I want to say a big thank you to the staff of the Office of Library Services
at IMLS and the folks who made today such a success.
So Mary Alice Ball, who was just here.
Tim, Terry who is not here, Sarah Fuller, Tim Murray and they did an amazing job and
they put this together and they deserve certainly the credit, so please thank them.
And of course because every event has a tremendous amount of very complicated logistics, we'd
like to thank Capital Meeting Planning, Matt and Margaret who really put together a lot
of things, I believe, probably including some of your travel and all of those other things
that you might need.
So thank you very much for Capital Meeting Planning.
[Applause] So what's going to come out of this?
Well, some of you might have noticed that Chrystie Hill and Mary Lee Prophet are here
and they're here to help us synthesize the comments you made and we'll publish the report
in about a month.
And it will be put up on to the IMLS focus Web site.
Most of you have found it.
Those of you out in the twitter universe are already leveraging it.
Along with the report, you will find the recordings of each of the sessions, they've also been
transcribed there is a live transcription going on.
It takes a bit to sync that back to the chunks, but that will all be available on the focus
Web site.
So what about the recommendations and what do we plan to do with all of this?
Well, just let me report on a few changes because I think some of it will affect the
conversation we've had today.
There were changes made to our discretionary program specifically to the national leadership
grant program in this last year, and so previously we had this really large broad call for projects
that would represent and carry out innovation.
And after last year convenings, especially the national platform convening, where this
was greatly discussed, they actually stepped back and took a different tact and they wanted
to identify proposals that would, quote, move the needle on some of the shared goals that
were discussed.
Guidelines were tightened up.
Priorities came out of those meetings.
We moved to two submission excuse me, two submission deadlines, and then within per
year so that you didn't have to wait an entire year.
If you happened to miss that one single deadline in that year.
We also moved to a twophase process, and this addresses I'm sorry Marsha is not here.
This addressed some of the points that we've heard earlier today about doing the 40page
or excuse me the fourmonthlong proposal and then you get it in and if people don't understand
it, there's four months of your work so we moved to a twophase process where you submit
essentially a twopage praise.
That goes out for review and then those, that after the review process, those that are identified,
a subset of them will go on to the full proposal.
So it's a way for us both to lower the level investment to get your projects in to the
work flow, in to the review by our outside reviewers, and also really identify hopefully
better proposals that come in because those fourmonth proposals are often 80 to 100 pages
each and we also want to be nice to our reviewers who do fabulous work.
One of the things that we did want to tell you, and we this is a hope at this point in
time, is that we hope to move to that twopage excuse me, twophase proposal process and two
proposals per year on the LB21 for the coming year.
It is not for sure yet.
We have to get this cleared by the Office of Management and Budget.
There's a it's going to them soon with a 30day public comment process, so if you're interested
in that, you can do that.
And we should know sometime during the summer whether we'll be able to do that.
And of course, then, we would post the notice of funding opportunities to the Web site,
so check back with us this summer as to whether we'd be able to do so or not.
Some final thank yous, first of all to Crosby and the staff here at the Kansas City Public
Library for letting us use this amazing, fantastic space.
[Applause] And thanks to all of you, especially, who
have joined us here, in person, as well as on twitter.
I think the discussion I can say on behalf of my colleagues, was more than we thought
we would get.
It's fantastic.
It was incredibly engaging.
And it gives us a lot of food for thought and perhaps makes us leave with very full
heads today.
So we're delighted, and we thank you for your time and your very good questions and the
fantastic discussion that came out of that.
We wish you guys all safe travels.
For those of you that have to travel to get home and as well we hope that you will all
join us for the next IMLS convening, IMLS focus convening, which will be June 2nd.
It will be hosted at the Los Angeles Public Library and the topic for that one is "Engaging
Communities."
So again, the IMLS focus Web site will allow you to live stream that.
You will see the list of participants that will be at that, and of course all of the
same reports and archived webcasts will be available there, too.
So thank you again very much.
[Applause]