Institute of Museum and Library Services 2020 Grants to States All States Conference May
11, 2020 Virtual Proceedings by: CASET Associates, Ltd. caset@caset.net
P R O C E E D I N G S (3:00 p.m.) MS. DEVOE: With that I am going to officially
welcome you to the Grants to States orientation. I want to introduce all of our program staff
since we can’t be here with you in person and we are doing this virtual conference for
the first time. We wanted to at least let you know what we look like. From left to right,
we have got myself, Teri DeVoe, I am the Associate Deputy Director for the Grants to States Program.
Then we have three program officers. The way that Grants to States is administered
is by assigning states in a portfolio to each of the three program officers. You probably
have a sense of who your program officer is at this point, but if not, (audio issue) Madison
Bolls, then we have Deirdre Gonsalves, who is actually our program specialist for the
program. Deirdre and I kind of work across all of the states in different ways, where
the program officers are assigned to specific states.
Then we have Dennis Nangle, (audio issue). He will be back with us probably in the month
of June. Even though he is not live with us on this conference, you will see a cameo or
two, of Dennis. So stay tuned. He is here with us in spirit.
Then finally on the far right of the picture, we have Michele Farrell, who is our third
program officer. This session today that we set up is targeted
really for new state library staff who will be administering the formula grants that we
give to you every year. We are going to review very basic information about the Grants to
States Program and some of the resources that you can use to administer the program.
We do have a session in the full conference that is called “IMLS Web Tools”, and that
will go into more details on some of these resources.
Today we are actually going to start with some vocabulary because as a self-respecting
government agency we are full of acronyms. (Call drops)
I hope I am back. Can I get a sign that you can hear me. Sorry about that, my call dropped,
and that happens occasionally. We are going to pick right back up where we were. So we
were talking about acronyms when I got cut-off, which maybe is a sign from the fates that
we should not be using so many of them. But we are going to talk a little bit about the
acronyms at the outset and then we are going to share with you some resources.
If you have grants with IMLS that are not of the Grants to States variety that will
not be covered in this session. We do have a whole set of grants IMLS administered directly
by the agency, whereas this is a pass-through program where you tend to do a lot of the
administration of the grants. So if you have a IMLS discretionary grant we would have you
contact the program officer that you work with for that program, if you have any questions.
Again, we are going to hold questions in terms of answering them until the end of this hour-long
session. That doesn’t mean that you can’t ask questions in the Q&A module. We welcome
you to ask them, it is just that we are going to let them queue up and then when we get
to the end we will answer them. So now I am going to turn it over to Deirdre,
who is going to give us some vocabulary and acronyms. So Deirdre, take it away.
MS. GONSALVES: Thank you, Teri, and welcome again. I would like to start off with the
glossary here. Here are some acronyms of vocabulary that are part of the program. Museum and Library
Services Act or MLSA, is the broader IMLS statue that encompasses LSTA, also known as
the Library Services and Technology Act. LSTA as currently amended, is a sub-chapter of
the authorizing legislation for IMLS. In 1996, Congress shifted the Library Services
and Construction Act to the Library Services and Technology Act, LSTA, as of chapter two
of the Museum and Library Services Act. This ended funding for Library Construction and
replaced it with a focus on new information technologies. LSTA also encompasses IMLS discretionary
programs. Implementing a population-based formula, the
Grants to States Program, sometimes referred to as G2S is the largest source of federal
funding support for library services in the U.S. State Library Administrative Agency,
or SLAA, are official agencies charged by law with the extension and development of
library services. The LSTA regulations require each SLAA to
submit a five-year plan that details library services goals. SLAAs must also conduct a
five-year evaluation of service goals based on that plan.
ACO, or Authorized Certifying Official for the grant, is the authorizing certifying official
for the grant award. In most cases, it will be the state librarian, but it can also be
the administrator that the state librarian reports to.
And the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies or COSLA, is an independent organization representing
state and territorial agencies designated as the SLAA. COSLA serves as a mechanism to
help address challenges faced by the heads of the state agencies, which are responsible
for statewide library development. On October 1, 2019, very recently as you know,
IMLS switched our grants management system to eGMS. eGMS is the electronic grant management
system now used by all of the agencies. You will learn a bit more about eGMS later in
this presentation. SAM.gov, SAM.gov is the official system for
award management website of the U.S. Government. The site allows grantees no-cost access to
register and do business with the U.S. Government, including updating or renewing your entity
registration, among other tasks. The next item, the Federal Funding Accountability
and Transparency Act, or as we like to refer to it, FFATA, was signed in 2006 to reduce
wasteful spending and increase public transparency of federal financial assistance and expenditures.
The FFATA sub-award reporting system or FSRS, is the recording tool that prime recipients,
in this case SLAAs, enter information on sub-recipients who have received grants of $25,000 or more.
This will be covered more fully during the Web tools session.
The State Program Report, or SPR, is part of an online system that is specific to the
Grants to States reporting requirements for grant awards.
Next is Match. Match is the amount of money, specifically 34 percent of total program budget,
that our LSTA legislation requires from a state library to contribute toward the grant
program each year. These funds are from non-federal resources, including state, local, corporation,
foundation or other non-federal entities. The SPR will automatically populate the expected
grant match amount. MOE or Maintenance of Effort, the Library
Services and Technology Act helps ensure that federal dollars enhance and do not replace
state support for library services. To receive the full amount allowed by the LSTA grants
to state formula a state must maintain its financial support for library programs and
services at not less than average amount reported for the prior three fiscal years.
If a state does not meet its MOE level in a given reporting year, its next allotment
is reduced by the same percentage as the missed MOE. The law provides an opportunity for states
to request a waiver of MOE under specific circumstances. Please refer to the Grants
to States section online at IMLS.gov or reach out to your program officer for more information.
The next slide. These are a few words that might be found on your actual grant award
document. The federal government requires a business, in this case the SLAA, to have
at least one of these numbers. IMLS does not assign any of the first three numbers: DUNS,
TIN, or the EIN. IMLS does however, assign the last one, FAIN. This is a unique number
that is essential to use when you are communicating to IMLS about your award.
Next, Madison will share more information on eGMS and communications.
MS. BOLLS: Thank you so much. Welcome everybody. Once IMLS has received word from the state
library that they have a new LSTA coordinator, we will send a welcome message letting that
person know who that program officer is and where to find information about the program.
Your program officer will also send a message regarding the mentor program and who your
mentor will be. The mentors are drawn from a voluntary group of experienced coordinators
so you will have two experienced people to talk to when you have questions about the
program. Your program officer is the person to contact
for the official interpretation of the program legislative requirements. Once IMLS has your
name and contact information, we will also add accounts for you to State Program Report
System and the eGMS system. Here are a few reasons to communicate with
your program officer through email. This is a good slide to print out and keep handy if
you have a question. You will want to use email for allowable costs questions, to notify
your program officer that you have changed any contacts in the SPR, any issues or troubleshooting
you are having with the SPR, any general feedback or questions that you have about the program
in general. Finally, with the Quarterly Grant Accrual, you will also send those through
email to the address that is listed on this slide.
eGMS. eGMS Reach is used by IMLS awardees to manage your award. If you are a chief officer,
authorized official, LSTA coordinator, library development or finance officer, or any associated
contact with a current IMLS LSTA award, you will have access to the system in order to
administer and manage your award. Through the eGMS Reach system you will have
access to request payments and send official grant communications to your LSTA coordinator.
You will also be able to send official messages to your program officer about official records
pertaining to the award. You have access to reporting schedules and previous payment requests.
Now, in terms of using Reach messaging, as I mentioned earlier, Reach is the official
record keeping system for IMLS awards. You would use Reach to communicate with IMLS for
record-level correspondence. So official correspondence. Again, this is a slide that you would also
want to printout and keep. IMLS has a great deal of information available to you on the
website, but you can communicate with us in terms of official records about equipment
requests - purchases over $5,000 per item. Submission of certifications or signed assurances.
Official MOE waiver requests, and as mentioned, payment requests. When in doubt, ask your
program officer where you should submit what. MS. FARRELL: Hello everyone, this is Michele
Farrell. I am going to talk to you now about the Grants to States Manual. When you go to
the IMLS website, www.IMLS.gov, you can find the Grants to States Manual. It is a key resource.
So if you are new to the program, which I know most of you are, or at least a number
of you are judging from the sign-in here, you are going to want to go to this site.
So you go to the IMLS website, click on grants, then under grants go to grants programs, then
select Grants to States. Once you get to that page, as you see on the navigation bar on
the left, there is the Grants to States Manual. Click there and it will take you to a number
of resources. There are sections in the Grants to States Manual on the awards cycle calendar,
financial requirements, financial performance reporting with the SPR, site visit information,
IMLS guidance, the statutes and regulations, which many people want to know what the names
and numbers are. Presentations and conferences that we have given in the past. Forms that
you need to use to submit things, and of course, our contact information.
Here you will see under the Financial and Performance Reporting Section of the Grants
to States Manual, these three very valuable guides. The first one, SPR Overview and Guide,
gives you a full picture of the State Program Report including how to log in, reporting
concepts, adding projects, intents, subjects, activities, outcomes, tags, financial reporting,
validating and certifying the report. The nice thing about this particular source is
it has hyperlinks. So when you go to a page you will see a link and it will take you directly
to where we have full information on how to do it.
The next resource is the IMLS State Program Reporting Requirements. You can look at this
first, it is about 146 pages, and that provides the information – it describes the SPR framework,
including a list of all SPR questions, that is questions that appear in the SPR report,
and defines SPR data elements. The third resource is the SPR Reporting System
User Documentation – the State Library SLAA view. This guides users through the SPR system
with screenshots and a glossary. When you re looking at this particular presentation,
this is only 34 pages long, the note section, you will see a picture of the PowerPoint presentation
and the notes are up in the left-hand corner in a little chat box. So you just press on
that. Here is what the front page of the Grants
To States Report looks like. Your program officer can set you up in the SPR system by
creating an account for you. Your username is going to be your email address and we will
send you a password. You can change your password by going into the account management section
of the SPR after you have logged in. You will note here on the left, please use Chrome or
Firefox as recommended browsers for this system. Issues with saving and editing can occur when
you open two browser windows or tabs for the Grants To States Report at the same time.
So it is best to avoid that. This page – this is inside the system and
here is where you find the state info page, which is under the accounts tab here. We look
right up here – here is the accounts tab in the SPR. Adding up to date content information
in the SPR is very important. You will need it to certify your report.
IMLS also uses the contact listed here when sending important communications. Please note
that only you can update this page. So that is very important to keep in mind. Once you
have updated this account management section, State Info, it is called, you click on that,
and this page comes up. After you have updated it, and make sure that you have all the serious
positions filled with complete information, after you have done that and closed out the
SPR, then you can send your program officer an email telling us that you have updated
the State Program Report in the State Information Section and
that you have added so and so, Mary Jones or whoever, as a new person and what their
position is. The DUNS or EIN are not required to save the
data but they are required to certify the report. Also note that parent organizations
should match the name associated with your DUNS number. That is another thing to keep
in mind. Here we have the various user roles. There
are four user roles in the SPR. We started off with three but with some input from the
states, we have added a fourth. The LSTA coordinator and the ACO, that is
the Authorized Certifying Official, have permission to manage subrecipient user accounts in the
system. They may establish user accounts as well as update logs or forgotten passwords
from your subrecipients. SLAA Project Data Entry users can also add,
view or edit all projects, but they cannot validate the report, certify the report, or
change state goals. It may be useful to add someone in this role who also works at the
state library and is running a project. Use of many navigations to go to accounts management
subrecipient access, click end-user and enter the contact information. Email addresses will
be used in logging in. Enter and confirm password, select the assigned recipient with the affiliated
institution. Select save user. One thing to note about users in the system
is that you can’t really ever delete anybody once they have been entered into the SPR as
a user. You can under – let me go back a slide and show you – we are talking about
subrecipient access. So you are in account management subrecipient access, you can go
in there and make them inactive. So you are not deleting but you are making somebody inactive
in the system. The next point I want to make is the length
of an LSTA grant award. The grant award covers a 24-month period of performance. So for example,
the FY2020 award starts October 1, 2019 and ends September 30, 2021. We have had a number
of years where there was a Continuing Resolution called the CR for federal funding, as a result
of that we have been sending out the award notification after January. So that sometimes
confuses new LSTA coordinators. A best practice is to finish off the funds from your previous
award – let’s say 2019 for example, before you start drawing down on your most recent
grant award, FY2020. Here is one of the documents that you also
may want to print out and use. This calendar is something that you will want to keep on
hand so that you know when items are due to IMLS. If you look here you will see that in
the coming dates you have got July 6, 2020 your Quarterly Grant Accrual Report is due
for the FY2019 and the FY2020 award. IMLS developed this worksheet that we are
looking at now, Worksheet to Calculate Grant Accrual Amounts, because there is not an official
federal form to do that. Each quarter’s accrual must represent the total expenses
for active grant awards that a grantee has incurred during a grant period but has not
yet submitted to IMLS for reimbursement. Because two federal fiscal years typically overlap
in a grant period, quarterly accrual information will cover those two separate active grants.
Submit this information no later than four business days after the last day of the quarter.
At the end of the quarter please send an email with the grant numbers and the total grant
accrual amount for the current award year in the body of the email to IMLS – it is
LSTA-QRTAccrual@imls.gov. What I want to point out here is if we look
down here at the numbers here, the first box with the numbers – LS-00-XX – that is
the way our numbers were for our grants up until this current year. With 2020, the grant
numbers you will notice have a different numbering. They will end in OLS dash, and the last two
figures are the year. So in this case it would be OLS-20. I just wanted to point out that
our grant numbers have actually changed the look.
Here you will see a picture of the 2019 Grants to States conference attendees, showing some
of your colleagues that were there. Above the picture is the web address for the listserv
that all LSTA coordinators who are interested can sign up for. This listserv was developed
with LSTA coordinators who wanted to share information of practical aspects of administering
the LSTA grants. Coordinators can ask questions regarding procedures, forms, software used,
et cetera. It is maintained by Ross Fuqua at the Oregon State Library. Questions about
federal funds and IMLS policy should be sent to your program officer. We are going to give
you the official information. IMLS is not responsible for the content of this list but
there is a lot of good stuff there and it is great to dialogue with your colleagues.
It is a great group and I have found lots of them using it, especially you can get involved
in your legislation. Now we would like to take some time to take
your questions. MS. GONSALVES: This is Deirdre. Heather has
a question. She says that she is not a LSTA coordinator, however she does supervise or
provide supervision for the coordinator. She wants to know if she can have a mentor.
MS. FARRELL: That is a good question. I will tell you Heather, we are set up – we like
to support the whole state library, but the reality is we actually have things set up
to work with the coordinator. Most official emails and conversations go back and forth
with the LSTA coordinator. Most of our training involves just the LSTA coordinators. This
year is the first year that we have actually opened up our conference ironically, because
it is virtual, to other people as well. But we will keep that in mind and I think maybe
Teri will weigh in later or something, about whether we can actually assign more than the
rest of the state library staff. It really depends on the mentoring how many
people they have already been assigned. We have very great mentors. They are really good
and they are very willing to work with LSTA coordinators. They probably might be open
to other people, but we have to run it all by them and see if they would be interested
and just check in on what their workload is because they are actually just volunteers.
Good question. MS. GONSALVES: Apparently that is the questions
unless there are more. MS. DEVOE: This is Teri. I might just toss
out that sometimes we talk about myths within the Grants to States Program and things you
might not be aware of. One myth that we often bust is that when you submit a State Program
Report to us that you are done in December and we are just going to review it and it
is going to be great and you won’t hear from us except to say congrats it is done.
That is usually not the case because we do have the program officer read those reports
very carefully and probably 90 percent or more of the times states are making edits
to the report sometime between January and March, before they are recertified and finalized
for the year. So there is no shame in being told by your program officer that we would
like to see some edits to your SPR. So we just toss that out as a myth that we would
bust for the program. If there are any listening veterans on the
line from states and you have things that you would have wanted to know when you were
first starting the program, we invite you to type those into the Q&A box and we can
surface things like that as well. Are there other myths out there? We will take other
questions, too. I’ll go ahead, while we wait to see if any
other questions come in. Another myth that we sometimes bust for the program is that
we as a federal agency there is a clear divide between feds and the states, and we don’t
want to hear from you. We want you to manage the program and if you have problems, work
them out for yourself. That is a huge myth. We definitely want to
hear from you. It is very much a partnership program between the feds and the states. And
to the extent that we can help you head-off any issues, we would love to hear from you
upfront. We would be grateful to have your questions at the outset. We have an assigned
program officer, we encourage you to be in contact with them anytime you feel like you
might have a question to raise to IMLS. So that is another myth that I would bust for
the program. Please know that we are accessible and enjoy
and want to hear from you. MS. GONSALVES: Okay, Teri, we do have a question
about current grantees wondering what is going on with site visits this year.
MS. DEVOE: We are in a very unusual year and to some extent I can’t speak for what is
going to happen to all the site visits this year. We have to figure out – at the moment,
IMLS staff are all working remotely. We have to follow the Federal Government guidelines
about when we work and go back to an office scenario and when we are able to travel.
We are going to be checking to see what kind of restrictions there might be on that side.
We also want to follow your lead if in your vicinity where you would be hosting a site
visit, there are other kinds of restrictions or things that would compromise the ability
to have a site visit, then we would be happy to talk about some alternatives and maybe
thinking about rescheduling those. I think for now we are going to tackle those on a
case-by-case basis. MS. FARRELL: This is Michele. I am bummed
because I won’t be going on site visits I had planned. Makes me very disappointed
because I love going out there and meeting with people individually and seeing what you
are working with in leading the people in the field who are carrying out the LSTA program.
I have to tell you that it is an adjustment for all of us.
MS. GONSALVES: Okay, we have another question. Will we be receiving five-year plan guidelines
during the next couple of days? MS. DEVOE: This is Teri. I can say that we
did not this year build five-year plans content into our conference. We were thinking that
we would definitely be covering some of that next year. The good news is we already have
our Five-Year Plan Guidelines approved by the Office of Budget and Management up on
our website. You can look at those anytime. They are in the Grants To States Manual area,
that was pointed out earlier by Michele. If you have any trouble finding them just let
your program officer know and we will get those to you.
This year we are going to focus on topics that we thought would be very pertinent for
you to know about. Specifically, CARES Act and COVID-19 response. We have got some great
presentations on the data that you submitted to the SPR for the year, as well as perspectives
from the states because we want to be sharing best practices in these forums.
If you have specific five-year plan questions that you would like to know about, let us
know and that will help shape next year’s program and we can certainly respond to things
in the interim as you have individual questions. MS. GONSALVES: Madison, we have a LSTA coordinator
who is relatively new in the position, just over a year, however this coordinator was
not assigned a mentor. Is there any way that they can get one assigned?
MS. BOLLS: Yes, of course. Tara, I will connect with you after the orientation and we can
get you onboard with a mentor. Thanks for flagging.
MS. GONSALVES: Michele, we have someone who would like to know if they can volunteer to
be a mentor. MS. FARRELL: Absolutely. We are always looking
for new mentors and we would love to have you onboard. Send me an email at mfarrell@imls.gov
and we would love to add you onto the list. Thank you.
MS. GONSALVES: I see there are several questions that are following up to Tara’s question
about getting a mentor. I would definitely advise you to reach out to your program officer
to have a more detailed conversation about how you
can move forward in trying to acquire a mentor. MS. DEVOE: I always want to raise, this is
Teri, in addition to the great questions we have been getting in, we have an awesome testimonial
from one of the LSTA coordinators about how great her program officer has been in fielding
question and she always appreciates the willingness to listen and provide feedback.
So you did not just hear it from us. Your peers are here to tell you that we want to
hear from you and answer your questions. We can stay on if there are some folks that
have lingering questions. The IMLS staff can stay and answer those for the next few minutes.
We have come to the end of our content for this session and
we are so grateful that
all of
you were able to tune in, test out
the technology platform, and be with us in person
for our first virtual kickoff of this event. We have a great couple of days in store over
the next few days. Tomorrow’s program is going to get started a little earlier than
today’s orientation session did. So it is 1:00 o’clock eastern time, which may be
different for you. That will kick us off with our welcome and IMLS updates, specifically
around the COVID-19 response and the CARES Act. We anticipate connecting with you again
then and we are so grateful that you were able to tune in today.
Thanks, everyone. MS. GONSALVES: Just a quick reminder, the
session has been recorded and will be available afterwards, if you
would like to revisit it.
(The conference adjourned at 3:45 p.m.)