[Music] and we're not quite ready to get started
yet we're going to give it a few minutes for folks
to join i wanted you to know that you're in the right place
and we'll be getting started shortly
if you're just joining us we are going to give it another minute or so for
folks to join and then we'll get started
um
before we get started i might ask my co-presenters to temporarily mute
themselves just to cut down on any potential
i want mo the associate deputy director for grants to states
we are doing something number of years which is a webinar on the state program
report or spr we have some new and exciting things
that are happening this year in particular in the spr and we wanted to
make sure everybody was on board with them
and we're just going to take some time towards the second half of the
presentation for a general refresher with some high level tips
so expert at the spr there's a few things
starting here that tend to be pitfalls and prep falls so we're going to try to
make sure everybody's being the most efficient
can be as they report so i'll ask dennis um
to advance the slide just as a reminder everybody
that is an attendee today is in a muted status a listen only mode if you
want to ask us questions if you have any technical
difficulties please use your question box we have
access to that here there will be a few dedicated
pauses in the presentation for questions so we
probably won't answer them on the fly as much but we will try to stop and make
sure they get answered and as a reminder we
are going to record today's webinar
view of content that we're covering today is just to remind you of the
upcoming reporting deadline we're going to talk a little bit about
the couple of systems that we have at imls that
can create some confusion around where you should be submitting your reports
we want to be sure that for the grants to states program things are coming into
the spr we're going to talk a little bit about
modification that we've rolled out into the spr that will allow
you to add some new contacts and probably the marquee topic of this
webinar we're going to talk about how to report your cares act
funds this year and how not to report your cares act projects this year so
please stay on at least through that part of
the presentation and then we're going to get into a
refresher and general best practices segment on the state program report so
next slide okay so as a general reminder and this
doesn't change from year to year the grants to states program
um year generally it's september 30th which gives you 90 days to then report
your projects and your financial data so most of the states that means that
your report deadline is december 30th there are some exceptions for the states
that came in and asked for extensions so you know who
you are but for most of the states it is fast
approaching this year what you need to submit by
december 30th is your 2019 your federal fiscal year
2019 financial and narrative reports so those are the projects that you spent
with your 2019 allotment and the financial data associated with
that as well as your admin project this year you also report your sort of
midway financial kind of minimal financial data
for your fiscal 20 allotment and that also is the year we
disseminated the cares act award so you will be reporting on full
20 award and the cares act award in this year's
interim federal financial report or interim ffr
and we'll have a few more screenshots on that in particular
if you cannot meet your reporting deadline
whether it's december 30th or you have an extension it's a bit later
we we really need you to let us know before december 30th or before your
reporting deadline that you're going to need some kind of reporting extension
that is different than a retention it's just for the purposes of getting
your report in but we still need you to communicate with us
you can make some edits on the back end of our systems
so that you don't get automatic alerts that you are suddenly delinquent
um so we really have that but we do depend on you to tell us
that you need an extension and since it's an official communication
with us at imls ideally it would come through the egms
reach system as a message to us but if you send us an email
we will make it happen so just remember to be in contact with us
if you get close to the reporting deadline and you can't get your
authorizing official to certify and sign off on it or something of that nature
next slide
all right i'm going to turn it over to madison thank you terry
i'm going to start off my portion of the presentation with a reminder as well
to submit your report into the spr not egms
and this is for only grants to states program awards
again you'll be submitting them through the spr i'll be repeating that a lot
today next slide please
as you all know just over a year ago we implemented our egms reach system
which is our electronic grants management system
and it's for imos as a whole significantly
egms reach is the new place where you can manage your payment requests
and send official grant communications and generally manage your award
next slide please
there we go now we've shared this slide with you before but for the purposes of
this presentation you can see here some specific instances
of when you should submit a message in egms
reach or when you should just send your program officer an email
we want to highlight again that when it comes to reports for the grants states
program you will submit reports in the spr
once reports are approved in the spr we will then review and do some record
keeping on the back end and put those reports in approved status
so you don't need to worry about them in egms but this slide is a great slide
to keep for your records just to give you some guidelines on what
to send an egms and what to send it as an email and as always uh
for quarterly grand accrual reports you'll always want to submit them
through email to the quarterly grant accrual email
address next slide please
here's another slide that we've shared with you before about egms reach
again due to the nature of lsd allotment awards
we generally will not use that forms and reports
tab um if you go to that tab it will display your reporting schedule but
again submit in the spr and as a reminder we
are also not using the change requests tab and that's for
lst awards only but we're about to look at where you can
manage contact changes which is within the spr
next slab slide please
so now we're going to move into the spr and show you some
additional contact field updates uh specifically in the
state info form next slide so the spr
includes a form for updating your slaa contacts
this is called the state info when you log into the spr
some of this information flows into define your report but it also includes
other contacts such as your lsta coordinator and fiscal officer
we made a few changes to this form this october
including a last modified date stamp which you can see
circled here very excited about this next slide please
and since you're already required to keep the spr form updated
we also use it to maintain contacts in egms reach
with this system launch last year we learned that many states needed
multiple fiscal contacts in order to process
drown drawdown requests so the spr info for
info form now includes two other fiscal officer fields and this is in addition
to the primary fiscal officer if you enter new contacts there and then
alert your program officer we can add these fiscal contacts to egms
reach and we recognize that some may already
have agms reach credentials but if you specifically
request it we can also get these folks spr credentials but that's only if you
request it uh we are working to push
notifications that would alert us automatically when this form is updated
uh but for now please continue to email your program officer
when you make changes to the spr state info form
next slide please
so here is what we've accomplished this year in terms of
spr infrastructure updates and we hope to turn to more of the user enhancements
in the next coming months but as a reminder we're still using
wednesday evenings as a maintenance window
to push new updates to the spr
now i'm going to pass it back over to terry
thanks madison and i'll just say a lot of the infrastructure updates we did
were in response to problems we've had in the past
with groups losing data out there in the states and
so we're really hopeful this year that we've got a nice solid platform
for you to work in and shouldn't be losing data in the ways that we've
sometimes had little hiccups in the system in the
past all right so we're going to turn to what we want you to do this year
around your fiscal year 20 a lot of my grant
and your carrier's fund so next slide please
okay so as a reminder at any given time you have multiple awards
going um in the grants to states program and this slide we put together to help
visualize this because it's sometimes hard to conceptualize
so right now the report or the fiscal award that you are going to report on in
its entirety with all the project data um talk about your admin project and put
a financial status report together that
big package that's getting certified is for 2019.
it ended this past september and we are now in the 90-day recording window that
you can see in the dark gray block on the top of the slide
at the same time you have an open fiscal 2020 award
and that was the same year that we issued your cares act award so the cares
act award is running in parallel with fiscal 20
but for this year in the spr the only pieces of that that you're going to
report on are represented in the interim federal
financial report so it is only a little bit of financial data to
help us see that you're tracking your funds they're getting spent
but it's a very high level report with no narrative details
no titles nothing specific until next year
as you can see with the dark gray and the dark orange box on the screen
you will not be reporting on the 20 award and the cares act award in their
entirety until next fall and leading into
december so i just want to clarify that and we'll
do it a few more times before we're done next slide please
okay so what you are going to report on for cares act
and fiscal 2020 is in the form in the system known as the interim ffr
report and we have done a few tweaks on our end
to accommodate the financial data and there's a few things that you're
going to have to do too so the first thing we'd like you to do
is when you get to the part of the form that says federal grant or other
identifying number assigned by federal agency
normally this would be a single number a single number that you would see on your
grant award well this year it's going to be two
numbers because we want to see both the number
associated with your fiscal 2020 allotment award
as well as the number that was associated with your cares act award
both those numbers are going to take the format ls
python a six digit number hyphen ols hyphen 20 and by 20 you will know that
it was issued in the year 2020 so both of them have the 20s on them you
can find these numbers in egms if you haven't seen them before
if you are an authorized user in the egms system
then you can drill into your award area and look in your documents tab
and you will be able to check your official notice of action which is the
jargony way of saying your award document and that will have the federal
award id number near the top that ls number
um so we want to have you drill into both of your awards the cares act award
and the fiscal 20 award to get those numbers
and then plop them in the interim ffr separated by a comma
so that's thing number one and then next slide
we'll talk about the financial data
as the slide's loading and i think i have some slowness on my side there
it comes from me we have done some back end auto calculation adjustments on our
part and so some of these numbers will be
pre-populated in the report the first bullet here is
one of those examples the total federal funds authorized is now
a combination of both your fiscal 20 allotment award plus the amount that you
received with the cares act award so it is a total sum number that will auto
calculate into that field which is illustrated on the bottom it's the top
of the fields that's illustrated in the picture
you will then fill out the next of the fields
which is the federal share of expenditures
and so you will tell us of those two awards how much did you spend in total
so you also will have to add those two numbers together
if you spent funds in both your fiscal 20 allotment and in your cares act award
so we want a combined total of both of those awards
spending in that box
there is also a total recipient share required
field that is your match and since cares act doesn't have any
match attached to it that still only reflects the amount of
match that you'd see in the allotment table
for federal fiscal year 2020 so that should also be out
auto calculated and not reflect anything above and beyond
like with cares act the last thing i want to say about these auto
calculation fields is that when we deployed the change
earlier this fall they did not automatically
populate into everybody's interim ffr in order for you to see these changes you
have to first open and save this report
right now you're not going to see the right numbers you're going to be
confused when you look at it for the first time
but just hit save and then refresh the form
and if for some reason at that point the correct numbers don't populate then you
can let us know and we'll look into it but we've seen a few states already um
accomplish this and the right numbers are showing
so just to note that they're not there right away but they they are secretly
there they are ready for you just hit save
all right next slide
okay and as a reminder you will not be entering your project data for cares act
this year we realize that some of you have rapidly
deployed projects that may have already finished
but the cares act award period doesn't technically
end until next september so that means we don't want to see any reports about
it until next year now if for some reason
you've already entered cares act project data in the spr under
the fiscal year 19 area don't despair you can still
open your fiscal 20 award instead which is where we want those projects
represented and you can copy in a project from the prior year
from 2019 so theoretically you can take that data
and just copy it in to fiscal 20 keep it there instead and then go back to fiscal
19 and delete it out if your program officer sees that you
have karazak data reported in your fiscal year 19 report
they will be sending it back for you to delete those projects
so just a heads up um and also if you put
financial data in it rolls up into the financial status report
and it will throw off your numbers because this year all we want to see
is the federal share around your fiscal 19
allotment grant that's it we don't want any karzak funds
coming into the picture this year except through that interim ffr which i just
described in the last set of slides you may still have questions you can let us
know in the questions box so you can follow up individually with program
officers but i'm going to pause here for a minute
and see if there are any just general clarifying things that we
can clear up right off the bat i'm looking at the questions box
and if we don't catch them now for some reason we have another pause or two for
questions in a later part of the presentation
i'm going to say because i'm not seeing any immediate questions why don't we
continue with the presentation keep your questions coming and we'll
make sure we get them answered so next slide
and now i'm going to turn it over to dennis all right who is
the guys of imless webinars today thank you terry uh so um
this is the portion of the webinar that will shift
from the kind of new cares act centric information that um is kind of important
year specific updates and then we're going to be moving
general overview information refreshers um other kind of general principles this
is good for anybody who might want a refresher as
this year obviously has been a bit of a whirlwind it might
be helpful or anybody who might be using the spr for the first
time so the first thing you do obviously um
is logging in and so um the your imless program
officer can set you up with an account if you
don't already have one um and if there are other um people in
your state library who need access to help um add project
information let us know and um we can also add um those accounts
as needed and so uh if you are logged in but
you received a temporary password from us uh there is an area
in the account management section of the spr that lets you
um change that password to whatever you want it to be
um there are some important technical notes related to the spr system
as a whole uh chrome and firefox are the recommended browsers we have found that
there is some inconsistency with using other
browsers um when entering spr data and perhaps most importantly we want to
urge you and remind everybody not to have two browser
windows or tabs for the svr open at the same time
this is where we find a lot of data is lost
if if you have one project edited in one tab and then you open another tab
to edit something else that data doesn't necessarily
always sync and save so we just want to make sure you're not
losing any data so as a best practice just keep an eye out on how many tabs
you have open when you're using the spr
so if you're a first time user one of the first
things that you should be doing once you're logged in is to navigate over to
the account management section of the spr there are three um
areas within the account management section that are
of particular interest we want to make sure that your user info
is accurate um when we set you up with an account we don't necessarily provide
every piece of information so if you have
additional um information to add that would be
extremely helpful and then um on behalf of your entire agency being
sure to review the state info section um if you're a new if you're a
new lsta coordinator you may need to go in there and add your
name in place of your predecessor um or even
those outside of your role at the state library that may have changed
it's important to make sure that that information is up to date and then
um thirdly if you're a state library that
gives subgrants this is often a
an often forgotten section of the spr but still really important it's the
sub-award info section of the spr now this exists
outside of a particular project so it's not in the project lists
um it does as you can see from the screenshot in the slide it does account
for a fiscal year so every fiscal year we
expect it to be updated with the appropriate information
and um what's helpful about this is that it gives us a bigger picture of
um of your sub award process the number of applications compared to how many
were actually funded so on and so forth so it's really it's
um especially helpful for us to kind of get a
greater sense of what your process is like
so now i'm going to shift gears from the spr system itself
and some of the behind the uh under the hood kind of technological pieces
and get into some general tips with the actual sections of the spr
itself um and we're going to um i'm going to hit some broader topics and
then later on um michelle will dive into
some of the more nitty gritty specifics so
the first thing um i want to talk about related to general
the general narrative so um across the different sections of the spr
you'll see various fields that'll ask for some
narrative information so that's the general description of the project
um the abstract and then the activities have abstracts
and then you have project outcomes at the end um
and so what we would like to see and what
um is is the most effective is to think about the entire project
report as a whole thinking about all of the sections of the spr
and how what you write can be unique to that section
so um don't feel the need to um copy and paste what you've said in
one section we'll read the whole thing as a whole
so it's really um especially helpful and succinct
for us to read unique information in each section
uh we recommend and ask that you use plain language
um avoiding acronyms and jargon uh this is especially helpful for um
for those of us uh not for those of us for an
audience that may not be necessarily in your state or
even in the library world because um as many of you may already know
this spr report data is publicly available once we accept it
so be thinking about that larger audience uh
be sure to write in the past tense sometimes and understandably so
it's um we we get some narrative information that was pulled
from maybe an application and so it still has a tense of we will
do this or we plan to do that but if it's happened and
since this is a final report we hope to see it in the past tense as
it's already been completed uh for when you're talking about folks
that were involved in the project use position titles and not staff names
there's a number of reasons for this but um the primary one
is privacy uh considerations but also it helps to understand what that
person's role was that was involved in the project
and then uh this is a big one for those of you that have projects that
exist and reoccur year after year we ask that you think about what made
this particular year unique with your continuing project maybe there was a
sudden increase in participation or maybe you had a user
survey and the results of that survey change the way you approach the project
those things are really really helpful pieces of information to
help us understand um what you're doing to kind of actively
address some of those things in your project year after year
for abstracts again abstracts are intended to be sort of like a movie
trailer for the rest of your project so uh
concision is welcome and is key and um
again especially for recurring uh projects finding out or identifying for
us what you did specifically this year rather than just doing a general program
description and what we're also looking for is since
we're looking at this project as a whole if you discuss
an activity or the purchase of something or any sort of
any sort of funded activity we would expect to see
that narrative description reflected in the budget and the subsequent activities
so what's nice about it being a top level abstract is you can just hint at
it and then we can see the details later in
the budget and activity section and ironically we're going to use a
bullet to tell you not to put any bullets in your abstract
uh and so hopefully that will stick in your
in your mind and um again as
as much as possible to pay attention to formatting and copying and pasting a lot
of times with the spr you will um paste from word or some
other some other document and it'll carry with
it some formatting and so what we found is that there are
some ways to work around this you can use notepad if you're a windows user and
copy and paste it into there first that strips any formatting out
before you paste it into the spr and then the spr
um itself also has a button that allows you to
paste without any formatting so that really helps because any formatting
that is pasted in will show up in the public view as well
dennis is you're advancing the slide there were two questions that came in
on this abstracts topic that i just want to surface while we're on the topic
rachel cook asked is first person okay to use in the report or do you prefer
third person and similarly cindy boyden asked can we use we in the abstract when
referencing the awardee like we did x y and z um
and i would say we see both we see both third person and the sort of
collective we i don't think we see as much i like i
did this or i ran this great program so that
might be something to avoid if you have a project director who's couching
everything in the first person i don't know if my
colleagues have anything they would like to add to that
yeah i would agree i think we we certainly
makes more sense than i i mean uh you know with so many of these
they're some of them are case by case but it would be
interesting for it to be justifiably one a one a single-person show
for a lot of these projects so no hard and fast rules but yeah i think that we
um is appropriate and acceptable generally great i appreciate the
questions so uh the next um topic that we're going
to discuss is statewide projects and what is
considered a statewide project the um so i'm referring to a section of
the spr that asks was this project statewide yes
or no and so these are some quick
bullets that help kind of frame that and remind you
of when to consider it statewide and when not to
um so one of the main areas is if the entire state's population is a
potential beneficiary rather than a specific and smaller
target audience um and so you know
a lot of these the most common statewide projects are the ones where you can
easily say every library and every population in
the state has equal access to this thing so
statewide databases is probably the most glaring example of this but in other
situations it could even be summer reading support if it's statewide
and if it's available to everybody in the states uh typically
the statewide projects are administered by the state library administrative
agency and um and if the statewide effort
supports one single intent it can be reported as one
project and so again using that database example
uh that would be an easy thing to identify as
a project now there can be a few activities within that within that
project if there was staff time dedicated to in addition to maybe some
equipment acquisition and those kinds of things
but um but that's that's kind of the the fine line with whether something was
statewide or not if if you are targeting a particular area or region
then it wouldn't be considered a statewide project and then you would
identify locales and beneficiaries at that point
so um we get a lot of questions about consolidating sub awards
under one um umbrella project um and rightfully so because
um many of you would like to uh report as efficiently as possible without
without a huge list of of projects and so um the
guiding principles with consolidating sub-awards is
if you have individual sub-awards so not the total sub-award initiative
but individual sub-awards of five thousand dollars or less
they can be combined together in a single project and
again if you gave out um 35 4 000
sub awards then they could easily be combined into a single project so it
doesn't have to be a cumulative um less than 5000 but they should
support a single intent because again that's how the spr program works
when you're recording projects is that we're expecting it all to align
to one intent and they should cover the same subjects
and uh target similar beneficiaries and um
so again that that helps make it a very it
allows you to organize really cleanly that they might be
separate awards but they were all contributing to
um a similar subject and intent so if you are have a
question um
let me see really quick apologies for the multitasking ooh there's a few
uh maybe we should take a breather through these questions really quickly
if a project uh susan whitney asks if a project benefits a specific age
demographic throughout the state it's still considered statewide even
though it is really only a targeted at one
demographic um i i would say yes uh
i think the key piece here is it's available statewide traffic is a
piece of it but then um if it is
uh only available to a select amount of libraries in a particular
region then it wouldn't be considered a statewide project it would still it
would be targeted to a handful of recipients so
the the um the specific age demographic is a component but there's
also the element of is this available to every
every library in the state okay let me look at the other question
uh amy is asking if the sub awards are over five thousand dollars they cannot
be combined um i think now i can i don't wanna speak
on behalf of my colleagues but that five thousand dollar um principle
is um is kind of general guidance there are you know discussions that can
be had with your program officer as you're planning the report
to determine oh this this still makes sense to combine
um and as amy mentioned this is under the specific
uh auspices of the cares act so you know we're definitely
evaluating everything on a case by case basis with these particular
pot of funds so um amy that's as you kind of get more information or if you
have it you can feel free to reach out to me after this and we can
maybe develop a plan for how you want to
report that um and ross has a similar question so it's
it's definitely more of the um consult with your program officer
because the keras act funds are definitely unique um
unique creatures so um so yeah i would say that five thousand
dollar rule is is intended to be a helpful
guideline um but if you feel that there's justification for combining sub
awards that are more than five thousand dollars each uh just talk
to us about it and that way you don't have to go through the process
of you know shaping up your spr only for it to might
not be compatible with what we're looking for
all right good questions i appreciate people engaging that's exciting
so speaking of intents um for those of you who might be new to the world of
the spr and the world of intense and the world
of vocal areas um this isn't intended to be memorized
or you know articulated line by line but it
gives you an idea a top level overview of
when we're talking about aligning projects to intents these are the ones
we're talking about and then in bold after
each intent we give you um the focal area that that
intent aligns with so the focal area piece is an fyi
because you'll see the intense selection is what you'll
directly in the spr um so be thinking of that
i think it is helpful when you're trying to figure out what intent
your project aligns with to kind of look at all of them and kind of get a sense
of what's the best fit obviously there is
it's not a black and white decision every time sometimes
you they could a project could apply to more than one and you just make the
best decision with with which intent most accurately kind of encapsulates
you're looking for and um another area that intents are
really important for is that they relate to the crosswalk
that you all submitted to us with your five-year plans
so um for some of you especially those of you who might not have been around
when the five-year plan was developed it might be a good idea to look at back
at your five-year plan and if you happen to identify
projects in your five-year plan um that you're planning to report on
then your intent selection might not be that difficult because it might be laid
out right there for you um it's okay if you're probably if it's
a newer project and it wasn't articulated in your five-year plan
but um the crosswalk that you all provided still might be a helpful
um starting point when you're trying to figure out which one
can can fit best and so again just kind of hammering this
out a little bit more uh there these words can kind of get
jumbled up in our vernacular so there's intense and
then underneath intense there are subjects it's like a
big russian doll of of things and so the for intents
you only we only want you to select one intent that is the big encapsulating
thing related to your project but you can select up to two
subjects that are under each intent and so
we give this these two examples here because
um we want to remind you that like certain subjects could show up in
multiple under multiple intents so just because
you found science technology engineering and math
underneath that first intent improved libraries physical and technology
infrastructure that doesn't mean that that's
necessarily the intent you have to choose because stem does show up
as a subject under other intents as well so really just kind of again
be looking at the large landscape of intents to kind of get a sense of what
the best the best choice would be
so activities so this is again more nesting we're kind of
getting more and more granular we went from the general overview
to the projects and now underneath projects there are activities
so a rule of thumb if you're trying to figure out should
i you know articulate this part of this project
in a fully fledged activity and a good rule of thumb is that an activity
should account for at least 10 percent of the total amount of resources
committed to the project and resources is a very specific term
or a very particular term that we use because
it can be actual funding that was committed or could be
um staff time which is also you know a resource that was committed to the
project so you know don't feel like an activity
has to necessarily be something that was acquired or something
like that it can be staff time that was dedicated um if it
was 10 of the total amount for the project um
we do ask that you keep under 10 activities per project if
you're finding that this project is so massive that it might
need more than 10 activities then maybe and again
this is totally case by case but it might
call you to um reevaluate and say oh maybe
maybe these can be more than one project if there are so many activities in the
one project and uh the activity title and
description should be different and it shouldn't be
identical to the project title and description
now obviously they'll um they'll relate to each other
but like i said earlier um they should exist for a unique reason uh and
that should be kind of diving more deeply into
something that was maybe just alluded to in the um
abstract or some other part of the project descriptions
so here are four the four i should say activity types so when you
get into selecting an activity and you are kind of figuring out okay
how am i going to organize this project the activity types and their modes
are extremely helpful determining factors
especially if you have a certain type of data
related to the project activity and you're trying to figure out
how will i report this the um the activity types and their modes um
will give you specific pieces or request specific pieces of data from you
depending on what you choose so again i won't go into all all four of
these but um what i will say is
that uh procurement is um intended to be
used for um purchases that don't contain
content if that makes any sense so they tend to be
larger scale purchases um especially we see them
most often with broadband activities uh because you're that's the procurement of
um of hardware and software that isn't that isn't loaded with
content that's specific to um a project like apps or software or
things like that and so um so keep that in mind when
you're deciding uh which activity to choose more often
especially when we're talking about equipment purchases
we see content acquisition uh because the con it's the equipment and the
laptops the ipads etc contain content and then this is just a
quick um because it's just a quick tip and uh
rule of thumb because it's one of those um unique situations that
we offer a best practice for but if you
have staff attending conferences using the
instruction other activity mode because um the other instruction modes don't
exactly fit the activity of
funding library staff to attend conferences so we recommend using
instruction other okay
and now i'm going to hand it over to michelle who's going to dive even deeper
hi everyone there's not too much more this is an example of activity abstracts
and this person this was north carolina i believe
did one and you can see it was a literacy project
that the actual activity is called awesome alphabet activities
and it very clearly states what it is it's a drop-in program
and so the activity they picked here was instruction
and the mode was consultation drop-in referral and the format was in person
i will tell you uh next slide
next slide okay a lot of this is is sounding much
more difficult than it is most of the time you don't have
procurement uh if you do have procurement it's gonna
it's only gonna come up if you pick institutional capacity is one of the
intents and then those are the three improving
library workforce physical and technological
infrastructure is probably the closest you get to procurement
and i would say if you're confused as we have said earlier call your
program officer as the three examples on the bottom of
this slide show if you're purchasing databases it's
content acquisitions not procurement if you're
purchasing laptops that's instruction activities that's
probably one of the biggest areas for new people
because laptops are viewed as equipment but they cost under five thousand so in
federal sense they're not equipment so it's
instruction activity and if you're subscribing to a data
collection service that's content creation next slide
this is a very good uh graphic in terms of
dennis mentioned the four activities instruction content planning and
evaluation well we at imls ask you to
tell us what the outcomes were and whether and to find those out you
survey people well as this graphic shows you you only have to ser
survey people um four times the general public only once and that's
for instruction activity and library work first however
there's three different times when you would
survey library workforce staff and that's for instruction content
planning or evaluation and i would say with some of my people
they say well a lot of people their survey burnout
and as my aunt margaret would say toughy lucky uh
you've got to uh you've got to do that because imls requires it as part of the
grant and when you think about the fact that
you're getting free continuing education then please fill
out the survey you have to market it to your library staff
because you're still going to be required to do it um
next slide
this is again a reminder in the budget section
if you've got conference registrations list those under the cert
in the services box not in travel or app software licenses again it's in
the services box not in supplies and
avoid vague descriptions we used to see a lot of this in the uh
other expenses box uh people don't put things like miscellaneous in
there because that makes us question what did you buy
so don't use that kind of terminology next slide
here's an example of listing budget um the first box the top box
shows you that they spent 15 000 from the lsta funds and a little over
uh 29 000 in matching funds for the project manager 25 percent
came out of lsda as it's described in the description
and 50 out of the state matching funds that is and notice no names of a person
just their title that's perfect in the next example we see an example of
match only funds which was over 16 000 and again here's this it's for the
salary and benefits for the state data coordinator with the description of what
that was next slide
this is an example of other operational expenses some of you have forms that
actually say other operational expenses it work for what you're doing at the
stake but in terms of the spr report other operational expenses usually only
comes up for indirect cost items and and the two
examples at the top the first one shows database subscriptions
uh that should be under uh services and postage
in the second example should be under supplies
the example without an x is an example of when you would use
other operational expenses and in this case
it was for a state library that gave a sub-grant
to merrimack college and they used some funds 665 dollars for indirect cost
if you're unsure about other operational expenses
again contact your program officer i say this for the new lst
coordinators next slide
additional materials is a section where you can list tool kits
you can get your press releases this is an example this bright futures of an
idaho report that was done on their summer reading program we'd love to see
these things because your abstracts tell us only so much but
when you've done a whole report or you've
produced a toolkit please provide us with that information we'd love to see
it we also see examples of the forms you
may be using when you survey people or whatever
next slide
project tags project tags are an option in this system and they're basically
it's cataloging it's put a word that you think applies to this project
if you're working with veterans it's nice for you to project tag it and
say veterans because that'll tell your colleagues when they search the sbr
and imls when we search it or the general public because it's open to the
public oh lsta funds have been used for
veterans and here's all the states and projects that apply and you can see
examples there for summer uh meals or make your space activities
next slide
match only a few people have match-only projects
um you enter it as a regular project you assign an attempt
you report at least one activity and it catches you include match only in the
title of the project next slide
project status the spr does give you the option
that you can change all of your projects at once
like when you're ready to validate and certify your report
you can change them all from draft to complete it because they have to be in
completed status for anything to be validated and
certified so that's a nice shortcut and you'll see
that on the left hand side of the screen where it says move projects to where it
says status there's a little box over in the corner there
that allows you to change the status right now it's showing draft
if you click it it'll all come up to complete it so you don't have to do them
individually next slide
there are two other places where you have to put in project information one
is your admin project for your 34 and
uh that you have because you could use up to thirty four percent
and the other one is your financial status report
so those are under projects and you see you'll see it's listed there
administrative project financial staff you click on either box and it will take
you to the one that you can fill out next slide
and i'm turning it over to madison hey y'all
i'm back closing us out so uh once you have completed your projects
it comes time to certify your report and in certifying the spr there are some
critical points to remember only the chief can certify your report
lsta coordinators can validate reports to head off any error messages
but the chief will still need to certify and they'll
to validate is sort of the same sequence of actions as it will take to certify
so uh first certification uh for this year will be for the final
reports for 2019 projects and the final fsr and admin project
you'll go into the spr and under projects select
certify reports in the menu and then the chief will be prompted to re-enter
their password uh you can ensure that the certification actually went
through by checking the project status under list projects and it'll say
certified or you can also check by looking at the
certification fields in the fsr and once that's certified that should
contain the name of the chief host certified it and the date
stamp that they certified uh next slide please
okay all right so the second part is uh certifying your interim ffr
uh and that is a separate thing you have to do in addition to certifying your
final reports um this often for us falls through the
cracks and so we'll have to come back and tell
you to certify that to follow up but again the chief is the one who who
can only certify uh to do this in the spr you'll click
on the financial status report and then interim ffr
and then certify and you can ensure the certification went through by looking at
the certification fields in the s interim ffr and it will contain the name
and the date stamp of the chief who certified it
and next slide please cool just some general reminders overall if
you'd like to play around with the spr get to know it a little bit better you
can use the sandbox it is available for practicing and training
and we have the link here and for all of you
uh all reporting deadlines are at the end of december final reports
include all projects and the final fsr and then the interim
uh financial uh federal financial report
is also due which is for the following year
man all of our resources are in our grants to states manual
and we keep those up to date pretty regularly so please feel free to check
out that link i know we have some questions but here
are the lists of all of us if you ever need to get in
touch with us
i just forgot something uh i said indirectly
uh 34 for him and i meant 4 percent for edmond sorry about that confusion
yes you just want to make sure everybody was paying attention
yeah i'm sorry i didn't catch that
cindy had a question about a number of tags that we can list per project
oh yes my knowledge there are no limits but terry
do you know we have a limit to the number of tags i don't know
i don't think there's a hard limit in the system i think there might be a
guideline in the state program requirements document
and i think it might be in the range of three as a like kind of
stopping point but we're not gonna send it back if you have five
so it'll be fine
all right we did have someone ask about the
controlled vocabulary around whether imls has um an
you know specific list i will say the reason
project tags is just the extra on top of all the other controlled vocabulary that
we have so we have subject tags that are controlled and we have intents and focal
areas and then the the search function within
the public view will also pick up any keywords from abstracts
and titles so really the idea of the project tags was to sort of
provide a unified glance across the states
for things that might be using different terminology
we had a long list at one point maybe a dozen terms i think we need to revisit
them but right now like the word making
is helpful to us because people talk about makers faces or hackers faces or
different things that kind of embody making but we put the term making
together just to like help us search it as an agency veterans
are still of interest to us summer meals are still of interest to us
but um this is not a hard and fast controlled vocabulary at this time
i would say too that a number of states are no longer calling their library for
the blind and physically handicapped the library for the blind and physically
handicapped and in the entire abstract you don't see
any reference to let's say a person who's
blind so you might want to put that word as a
project ad just as an identifier if someone was looking
for that and was unaware that you're calling it
the able library or something else
and it's good for new terminology that comes up that's why we
you know all of a sudden there's something people are doing
it's a new term in the library field
we have a couple more questions uh marla from new mexico was asking
and confirming that for the ffr for fy20 we only report what was reported um
what was spent by september 30th and that's correct
unless you have an extension true for those of you who have extensions let
me know if you have questions because they're all my staples
okay well i know we're like right at the hour so
we're gonna cut this recording off now but
reach out to your program officers and thank you so much for being with us
today we will send the slides and the
recording out once they're posted on our website may
take a little time but we'll be in everyone
you