On Friday night, the President released yet another Executive Order, titled “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy.” Section 1 of the order states that the following “elements” of our U.S. government are “unnecessary” and orders that the “head of each government entity” in the list below has 7 days to submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget’s Director (who has been quoted as saying that he wants to put our federal workforce “in trauma“), and confirm “full compliance with this order.”
The list of federal agencies includes the following:
(i) the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service;
(ii) the United States Agency for Global Media;
(iii) the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution;
(iv) the Institute of Museum and Library Services;
(v) the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness;
(vi) the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund; and
(vii) the Minority Business Development Agency.
In response to this EO, the American Library Association released a statement and took to social media over the weekend, as part of its “Show Up for Our Libraries” campaign, to raise awareness about the President’s attempts to gut the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the impact it would have on our nation’s libraries.
In its statement, ALA wrote,
“Americans have loved and relied on public, school and academic libraries for generations. By eliminating the only federal agency dedicated to funding library services, the Trump administration’s executive order is cutting off at the knees the most beloved and trusted of American institutions and the staff and services they offer:
- Small business support for budding entrepreneurs
- Early literacy development and grade-level reading programs
- Summer reading programs for kids
- High-speed internet access
- Employment assistance for job seekers
- Braille and talking books for people with visual impairments
- Homework and research resources for students and faculty
- Veterans’ telehealth spaces equipped with technology and staff support
- STEM programs, simulation equipment and training for workforce development”
Another service not mentioned in this list is the support that IMLS has provided over many years for students and researchers like me. In fact, if it wasn’t for IMLS I would most likely not have my job today.
In 2009, after learning that the Obama administration would invest $4 billion dollars to advance universal broadband access and support for public computing centers and sustainable broadband adoption initiatives through its Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, I decided to leave my job as a digital inclusion practitioner at Cambridge Community Television in Massachusetts to get a PhD and become a researcher to study this unprecedented investment in our nation’s broadband and digital inclusion infrastructure.
In 2010, I was accepted into the doctoral program in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a full scholarship. This scholarship was funded by a unique doctoral program that was supported by the IMLS. The program, led by Dr. Linda C. Smith and Dr. Dan Schiller, was called the “Information in Society” specialization and was described in the following (via the Wayback Machine).
“We received a preparing future faculty grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to enhance and expand our doctoral studies in information in society, including policy, economic and historical dimensions. Our goal is to make visible, and draw together, key elements of the fragmented cross-disciplinary academic context within which the study of information in society is now occurring. Graduates of this specialization will be well prepared to teach the next generation of library leaders for whom it will be necessary to acquire a broad range of knowledge about the increasingly complex issues of our informationalized society and to operate at high levels of policy formulation.”
This program, funded by IMLS, truly changed my life and the life of my family. Just after my daughter was born, my family and I moved to Champaign-Urbana (where we did not know anyone) from the east coast (where we had lived most of our lives) to start a new life in the Midwest over the next four years. It was hard, but it was worth it. Thanks to the Information in Society program, funded by IMLS, we quickly met new friends in my doctoral program many of whom would also go onto to become leading scholars in our field, including Safiya Noble, Sarah Roberts, and Miriam Sweeney, among many others.
After receiving my PhD from Illinois, I was able to get my first academic job in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Oklahoma. There, I connected with Dr. Brian Whitacre at Oklahoma State University who had been conducting broadband-related research with Dr. Sharon Strover at the University of Texas at Austin. The two are leading broadband and digital inclusion researchers in the U.S., and there I was just a junior scholar at the time. Through our relationship, the three of us submitted an IMLS grant, via Sharon Strover at UT Austin, to fund our research to study how rural libraries can support their communities, particularly those without access to the internet at home, through Wi-Fi hotspot lending programs. This research project played a significant role in launching my career as a scholar in library and information science, as well as helping to provide some of the first national studies on hotspot lending in public libraries.
After moving back east and starting a new position on the faculty in the Simmons University School of Library and Information Science, I became the Principal Investigator on another IMLS grant with my colleagues at Measurement Lab and Internet2 to develop an open source broadband measurement system with and for U.S. public libraries. This video on Internet2’s website describes the outcomes of our 3 year research project, titled “The Measuring Library Broadband Networks for the National Digital Platform” project which was funded by a grant (award #LG-71-18-0110-18) from the IMLS National Leadership Grant for Libraries program.
To learn more about the impact that the IMLS has had on public libraries and museums and the communities they serve, you can visit their website which includes summaries of statistics on their impact to communities (image below is a screen capture from the IMLS website).
IMLS is also one of the only sources of national data on public libraries in the U.S. See image below from the IMLS website which allows visitors, including researchers, policymakers and members of the public options to study and compare data on public libraries across our nation.
IMLS also provides some of the only funding for tribal libraries through its grants to Native American Library Services and grants to Native American/Native Hawaiian Library and Museum services programs.
The people at IMLS are also some of the smartest and most thoughtful people who serve our country. I am grateful for people like James Neal, a senior program officer who has been leading digital inclusion initiatives within IMLS for many years and Cyndee Landrum, Deputy Director of Library Services. Without these and many leaders at the agency, which has been funded by a small budget, I worry what the impacts will be to our nation’s libraries, museums, and the communities they serve.
For these reasons and more, I am extremely grateful to the IMLS, the people who work there, and the impact the agency has had on my life, now as a full-time faculty member in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I only hope that others will share their stories of the impact that IMLS has had on their lives either directly or indirectly through its support for our nation’s libraries and those who study and care about them.
Thank you, IMLS.
#saveIMLS