Institute of Museum and Library Services 2020 Grants to States All States Conference May
13, 2020 Virtual Proceedings by: CASET Associates, Ltd. caset@caset.net
Agenda Item: IMLS Web Tools: Overview and Demonstration
MS.
DEVOE: It is 3:05 and I want to welcome you back from our break.
If you were tuned in yesterday, Dennis Nangle, one of our program officers has been on paternity
leave, but before he went on his leave time he recorded a segment that weíre going to
listen to in this next session.
Before we tee that up, we know that there has been some audio and video issues for some
of you out in the field, we know that others of you are hearing everything just fine.
This is a typical bandwidth issue, perhaps Wednesday afternoon is turning out to be worse
than yesterday, Tuesday afternoon.
But in addition to logging off and logging on again, which is always an option, it kind
of refreshes things, if you are on any kind of VPN network it might be smart to just log
out of that and try accessing the conference just from your internet connection and realizing
you might not have access to all your applications that way, but youíll get a clear sound and
video experience if you try that.
So one option for you.
So again weíre going to have a recorded demonstration of some web tools, and we will have a couple
of knowledge checks built into this throughout so watch for some poll questions, and we will
check in with you at a few points in this presentation.
So Mitchell, we are ready to play the video.
MR.
NANGLE: Hello, welcome to this brief presentation about web tools for grant administration and
research.
I am happy once again to join you virtually as I provide a mini presentation/demonstration
of different web tools that might be helpful for you.
As you can see from the title, theyíre broken down into two primary areas, either administration,
that can help you with just the day to day grant administration functions, and then the
research element, which actually might help you, tools that might help you make more data
driven decisions based on various factors, if itís your subgrants, if itís other priorities
that you want to focus on with your own grant funds, these tools might be helpful for you.
The first tool I want to talk about is the Grants to States Manual.
I would say this is our primary administrative tool.
It takes the place of what was formerly the extranet, some of you who have been here for
a couple of years might remember that the former extranet was behind a password, it
was on the IMLS website, it has since migrated to the Grants to States Manual, and that is
not password protected, so itís pretty easy to access, and it is the primary source of
guidance for your grant.
And what that means is you might have seen this in some of the grant reward language,
but itís already, instead of other grant programs that have terms and conditions, our
terms and conditions are all laid out in the policies and the guidance that are in the
Grants to States manual.
Many of you are probably already aware of where the Grants to States Manual is located
on IMLS website.
But as you can see from the breadcrumb trail up here you start at the grant area and then
grant programs, and then thereís a grant to states section, and then thereís the Grant
to States Manual.
I highly recommend once you navigate here to just bookmark the URL, itís much easier
that way.
I just wanted to kind of show you some of the various sections, how the manual is broken
down.
Thereís a couple of really valuable areas that you might see yourself returning to a
lot.
You can see some of the information about the five year plan guidelines are here under
Five Year Plan and Evaluation, thatís pretty straightforward.
This area in particular can be very helpful, thereís a lot of fluctuating timelines both
for both of the grants that youíre managing at the same time, so clicking on these calendars
helps kind of remind you of the various due dates.
A lot of our guidance is listed here.
So if you have questions about some cost questions that are coming your way, whether itís at
the state library or from a sub recipient, this is a place to look first.
Weíre happy to help you with any questions you have, but sometimes itís helpful to look
at the existing guidance thatís already here.
And also, too, a lot of helpful information can be found under Presentations and Conferences.
All of the content from previous Grants to States conferences are in this section right
here, so by clicking on these links it will take you to a page thatís dedicated to all
of the information.
These can be a little hard to find sometimes, so I like to point out where these are specifically.
The next tool I want to briefly touch on is the System for Award Management website, our
SAM.gov.
Iím sure that an overwhelming majority of you are very familiar with SAM.gov.
I wonít spend too much time on this, I just want to highlight how critical this system
is for our grant award process.
We cannot administer or provide any additional grant awards until an entity has an active
same.gov registration.
And I just want to briefly cover the system and also discuss how it interacts with our
eGMS system on the administrative end.
So SAM.gov is a fairly straightforward system, and all youíll typically use it for is to
ensure that your entity is registered and eligible for federal assistance.
So I just wanted to briefly point out how it interacts with INLSís grant award process
via eGMS.
So prior to making annual Grants to States awards or any awards that come from the Grants
to States Office, we do what is called a pre-award check, and that includes using eGMS to check
each state library entity for a current and active SAM registration.
So these screenshots show how the data on sam.gov synchronizes with eGMS system as we
verify your records.
And I also wanted to point out SAM.govís help section, specifically the full user guide
for non-federal entities.
I really recommend saving the PDF of this right there on that download PDF section or
linking this in any internal administration manuals.
It provides helpful explanations of the various statuses the registration goes through, and
also because thereís a newer element with having to provide a notarized letter to verify
that you are representing your entity accurately.
Itís just nice to have that guide, because Iím aware that in several state library agency
organizations there can be a great number of people who are tasked with managing the
SAM registration.
The third and final administrative tool I wanted to point out is the Federal Funding
Accountability and Transparency Act Subaward Reporting System, FSRS for short.
As you can see the URL is right there, FSRS.Gov.
This applies to state libraries who offer grants or give subawards of $25,000 per award.
And this really helps assist in federal government transparency efforts.
The data that is submitted through FSRS.Gov directly gets uploaded to USASpending.Gov.
So this is really more of a due diligence responsibility, and we use this site for that
purpose.
So much like SAM.gov, using FSRS is relatively straightforward and a routine process, so
thereís not too much to cover here beyond just wanting to highlight that also like sam.gov
their help information is actually very valuable and pretty robust and has a lot of really
good information.
But it seems like once you actually log in it becomes difficult to know where that help
material went.
When youíre just in the landing page itís much easier to see where the FAQs are and
where some of the training materials are, but once you actually log in, it kind of disappears.
So I just wanted to point out that thereís a tiny link on the bottom of the page when
youíre logged in that says resources page, and I think that can be pretty helpful.
Thereís a lot of great reference guides, even further down which you canít see in
this screenshot, but thereís more technical guides, and one of the guides is for doing
batch uploads.
So I just wanted to point out that if some of you are giving a lot of awards at once,
and some of them are maybe higher dollar awards, it might be easier to just do a batch upload
as you give the awards out.
MS.
DEVOE: We are going to take a poll break.
A state receives an allowable cost question from a subrecipient.
Which section of the Grants to States Manual might be the best place to start: Five Year
Plan and Evaluation, Award Cycle Calendar, IMLS Guidance, Presentations and Conferences?
So the poll is out, ready for you to answer, and weíre getting a bunch of answers coming
through, weíll give it a few more seconds, letting you all respond.
I feel like weíve reached a point where weíve got most of our votes in now, so weíll broadcast
the results.
We can see that most of you would have looked in the place that we would have suggested,
which is the IMLS Guidance Section, which has information about allowable costs.
There are other sections of the manual that you might find helpful in this regard too,
but that would be our answer.
So now weíll resume the show.
MR.
NANGLE: So now that we have covered all of the administrative tools for this session,
weíre going to pivot over to the research related tools.
And the first one that I would like to discuss is Library Search and Compare.
The URL is listed right there for your reference, and itís a database of all of the data that
comes out of the public library survey, and it only has the most current PLS data in there,
so itís replaced every time thereís newly verified data, and itís very helpful for
finding local data about libraries across the country, and thereís also as the name
implies thereís some good comparative ways to look at similar types of libraries and
seeing how they stack up against each other.
So this is what Library Search and Compare looks like when you first click on the link.
And itís basically by default a big listing of all of the results for public library data,
and this is pulled from the Public Library Survey, and it has the data from the most
recent finalized results.
And so in order to refine this list if you wanted to dig a little bit deeper and kind
of wade through the over 9000 results, you can use this refinement panel up here.
Itís fairly straightforward, for a lot of them youíll just click on it and either check
some boxes based on what you want to kind of refine the results by, and then for some
of the number based ones theyíll allow you to define a range if you want to see it that
way.
And so when you begin to define results, letís say I wanted to look at city libraries, as
it refines, and now thereís 587 results, you can begin to click into different results
and see more detail about this.
And so it can be helpful, especially when youíre looking at outlets next to each other
like this, you can compare some of the different details there and see kind of how the trends
fluctuate, and you can also shift the different trend data as you need to look at them.
And thereís also a lot of download options.
So you see a download button here, but there are download buttons in other areas as well.
If I return to the search results and I just wanted to see letís say city libraries in
Alabama, that will take my results down to 19.
I can compare these, and I can see more data all at once.
So there are a lot of different things that you can do to refine your results and look
at interesting comparisons.
Itís helpful, especially service area population stands out right away, where you can see those
differences.
And then once you have a good comparative set that you like you might want to return
to, you can download this comparison as well.
So there are a number of things that you can do with library search and compare, and it
might be helpful for some of the administrative or grant related decisions that you might
need to make.
The next research tool that I wanted to share with all of you is the SPR Public View.
This may be a very familiar tool for many of you, but something I just wanted to cover
in the broader suite of tools that will be useful to you, and itís a public facing database
of all of the SPR project information that you all have submitted through the internal
side of the SPR, and this covers project data from as far back as 2014 until 2018, because
we just accepted the overwhelming majority of the SPR reports.
And so this is really helpful because thereís an ability to filter by several facets that
are already found in the SPR.
So if youíre wondering why weíre asking you about intents and focal areas and beneficiaries
and whether something is exemplary, this all shows up in the public view.
And thereís also a nice state summary feature, and you can even compare those summaries across
states and across fiscal years.
So Iíll show that right now.
This is what the landing page for the SPR Public View database looks like.
This is another database and resource that I recommend saving the URL as a bookmark or
a desktop shortcut just because right now there is so much content on the IMLS website
for grants to states related materials that right now this particular resource is not
right at the forefront, so it would just be easier to refer to later with the bookmark.
And so as you can see itís a very straightforward system, thereís one search bar, you can put
any kind of key word or search term that youíre looking for in there, and what you can do
is either refine by a fiscal year or the specific state that you want to look at, or you can
leave these alone and just search across all years and states, or you can leave this blank
and choose one of these or both.
You canít just click go and see everything, you have to either refine by year or state,
and you can do both, thatís fine as well.
Another area, before we get into what the search results look like, is this view summaries
link is a little bit out of the way, so I just like to point it out, and if you click
on that itís interesting because it shows a unique set of data related to the information
that you input into the SPR, specifically also the subaward info section, this is a
dedicated area of the SPR, and if you are giving out subawards they definitely should
be filled out.
And so I just want to show an example of Delaware in 2017, click on this, youíll see that immediately
you can see the amount of projects that Delaware funds with LSTA funds and how much theyíve
received and how much theyíve put in match.
And then also whatís interesting is showing the projects and how much theyíve aligned
to the various focal areas.
Whatís cool about this is that you can get a snapshot view, you can also select multiple
states if you wanted to see, and so adding California to the mix adds a lot more allotment
funds, a lot more projects and subawards and things like that.
And you can see how the focal areas shuffle out too.
So thatís an interesting feature that might be helpful for you.
And again, just looking at the projects here, Iím just going to pick 2018 and Florida,
and you can see how the results look.
So you can see the abstract here by showing and hiding it there, if you wanted to get
a quick sense of whatís in the particular project.
And based on the content of the search results you will see various refinement areas that
you can choose from.
So if you wanted to see all of Floridaís projects related to lifelong learning you
can select that and refine it, and intense and all of that, so it keeps going, you can
really drill down and get really specific as you choose.
So this is great.
You can also print these results, you can export them as an Excel spreadsheet if you
would like to, and itís just a really dynamic tool and itís very helpful.
And like I said if you click on a particular project you can copy and paste the URL that
goes with this project and share it with folks as needed.
The last tool I want to share with everyone is the Awarded Grants Search Tool.
This is really helpful, itís a quick and comprehensive database of IMLSí discretionary
awards both in the library and museums idea of things.
And I indicate that itís discretionary awards, there are kind of ìstubî records of grants
to state awards, but it doesnít get into the project level, and thatís why we have
the SPR public view, because the scale of the grants to states awards are pretty massive,
and so this is more useful specifically for looking up discretionary awards.
And it includes the ward amount, the recipient, and then project abstracts, and occasionally
there are links to the full proposals as well.
This is what the awarded grant search site looks like.
As you can see from the breadcrumb trail up here it is under grants and then right away
you see the link for search awarded grants, so itís easy to find.
And these are the different fields that you can choose to refine your search.
You can choose any that you would like or as few as you would like.
The grant programs are listed here, which is helpful if you wanted to start across that.
Something else thatís interesting about this search is that you can search by issue area,
if you wanted to filter and see whatís going on with digital initiatives or STEM, maybe
early learning, you can filter that way.
Something else I wanted to show is the program categories.
So even within the National Leadership Grants thereís specific subcategories like community
catalysts and the new app program.
So if I wanted to click on community memory and that be the only thing that I search,
and hit apply, the results show down here, which is really helpful, it shows you the
ward amount, the specific log number, and the abstract as well as the proposal if you
wanted to get into the specifics of the project.
What is also helpful is these download CSV or download doc options.
So once youíve created a search you can actually download a CSV copy of it, or a Word document
if oyu wanted to look at it that way.
So again, this is a nice way of looking at kind of the broader spectrum of what IMLS
is awarding beyond just grants to states, and it could be helpful for various research
that you might be doing.
The third research tool that I wanted to share briefly is the IMLS Data Catalog.
This is especially helpful because it is very well curated.
It is essentially a catalog with links of all of the data products that are available
to you in the event that you needed to really dig into data and do a lot of comparative
work.
And so in the subsequent slide where we go over and demo the site itself, youíll see
more, but what is nice is in particular to the state library need is it has the raw data
for the public library survey, it has information about the state library administrative agency
survey, and also the IMLS funding reports by state.
So very briefly this is what the data catalog looks like on the IMLS website.
As you can see by the breadcrumb trail up here you start in data and then you see the
data catalog link right there, so itís pretty easy to navigate to.
This is basically a list of links of different data products that IMLS has to offer.
We already went through library search and compare, but you can find a link here which
might be a convenient way of coming back to that.
Then there is the PLS Survey Data, this one also could be particularly of interest to
all of you, the Statewide Library Administrative Agency Survey, and then other data products
as well.
Something I wanted to make sure I highlight at the very bottom of this list are the IMLS
funding reports by state.
Some of you may recall that a couple years back Matt and the data team did funding reports
and visualized how theyíre laid out by state, and these can be very handy for looking at
the broader picture of IMLS funding, not just grants to states but the other sources of
funding as well, and you can actually see links to these in your state profiles as well.
So they come up in multiple locations.
But I just wanted to let you know that those are also available through the data catalog
all in one place.
MS.
DEVOE: We have come to our next poll.
If you wanted to see examples of Discretionary Grant Proposals, where would you look?
Library Search and Compare, SPR Public View, Awarded Grants Search, or the IMLS Data Catalog?
So the poll is open, you can submit your votes.
We have results coming in.
Thank you to all of those still tuned in and engaged with this session.
We are getting some good results.
And I feel like we have most of the results in,
so why donít we broadcast those results?
And you have overwhelmingly selected Awarded Grants Search, which is indeed where we would
suggest looking for examples of discretionary grant proposals.
Great job everyone.
We are now at the end of this session and taking another 10 minute break.