EXECUTIVE ORDER PROJECT: How Will Reduction of the Institute of Museum and Library Services Affect Local Libraries?

Programs and services that help veterans, support literacy are in jeopardy.

By Adele Uphaus
MANAGING EDITOR AND CORRESPONDENT
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"Library of Virginia" by Sky Noir is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Last month’s Trump Administration executive order eliminating “to the maximum extent” the Institute of Museum and Library Services will affect early learning and literacy programs and other services provided by local public libraries, especially those that are small and rural.

IMLS “completely paid for us to start and maintain our 1,000 Things for Kindergarten program that provides early learning and literacy skills for our youngest patrons,” said Megan Upshaw, director of the Caroline County Library.

IMLS funding supports the library’s electronic databases, such as VetNow, which helps veterans apply for local, state, and federal benefits, and Homework Help, which provides “learning help and live tutors” to students, Upshaw said.

The federal funding also supports the library’s website and its ability to provide internet access to patrons of its four branches, including the one in Dawn, a rural area in southern Caroline.

“We’re not sure yet how much it would cost the library to keep providing all of these services if IMLS funding was eliminated,” Upshaw said, “but it would most likely mean cuts to the number of databases we could afford to keep providing to county residents or potentially fewer new items as we have to absorb the cost into our current state and local funding.”

The IMLS is an independent agency of the federal government that was established in 1996 and provides support for libraries and museums in the U.S.

Last month’s executive order eliminated all “non-statutory” components of the IMLS and six other entities—the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service; the United States Agency for Global Media; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution; the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund; and the Minority Business Development Agency.

The IMLS’s statutory functions—which are mandated by Congress in the Museum and Library Services Act—are to provide federal funding to state library agencies for library services, including training for library staff and expanding access to information resources.

Non-statutory functions of the IMLS, according to the nonprofit EveryLibrary Institute, include grants for other programs that support the recruitment and training of new librarians, increase diversity in the library workforce, provide technical assistance, and support digital literacy.

However, this week, all 75 employees of the IMLS were placed on administrative leave and their email accounts were disabled, which leaves the status of all funding awarded for this year “unclear,” according to a statement from the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403.

Dennis Clark, the Librarian of Virginia, said in a statement that the Library—which is Virginia’s state library agency—“expected the funding from the statutorily required Grants to States program to remain available through September 30, 2025—the end of the federal fiscal year. However, as of this morning, April 1st, we have not received our last funding infusion.”

Last year, the Library received $9.7 million from the IMLS. About $4.3 million was from the Grants to States program, and the rest, “the majority of what Virginia receives, would likely be considered discretionary,” Clark said.

“And it’s unlikely that those obligations will be met, as there are no longer active IMLS employees,” he said.

Programs and services supported by IMLS

The entirety of the funding provided through the Grants to States program goes towards supporting the kinds of services and programming mentioned by Upshaw. In 2024, across Virginia, that funding was spent in the following specific ways (among others):

• $1.6 million for FindItVa (Online databases available in every school and public library focused on students at all levels as well as job seekers)

• $171,259 for Public Library Infrastructure (website hosting and web development support, the Deaf Culture Digital Library)

• $74,240 for Adult Services Consulting (online learning scholarships, training, listservs, newsletters)

• $11,844 for E-Rate (support for broadband adoption, system and technology upgrades)

• $184,241 for Summer Reading Programs (materials, nature backpacks, newsletters, youth literacy materials)

• $159,501 for Electronic Records and Open Data (web archiving, electronic records processing, training)

• $156,378 for the Virginia Newspaper Program (digitization and searchable access to Virginia’s regional newspapers)

• $712,817 for Information Technology Support (infrastructure and technical support for all Library of Virginia digital and physical collections)

• $154,131 for Lifelong Learning (training in use of primary sources and civic engagement events)

• $10,714 for Document Bank (searchable site containing important Virginia documents, organized by historic era, theme and the Virginia Standards of Learning)

• $69,804 for Interlibrary Loan (service that allows the public library community and other organization to obtain resources not readily available in their local community)

“Most, if not all” of these programs would “cease or greatly diminish” if IMLS funding were eliminated, Clark said.

Lisa Varga, executive director of the Virginia Library Association, pointed to FindItVa—also referenced by Upshaw, the Caroline library director—as one of the most valuable resources supported by IMLS funding.

For adults, FindItVa provides access to downloadable and fillable legal forms, including a section of templates for small businesses; connection with a certified job coach; foreign language instruction; a business skill development library; and technology instruction, among other resources.

And through VetNow, also available through FindItVa, veterans can connect with a benefits navigator seven days a week, and find community resources and help transitioning from a military to civilian career.

All of this is available for free from a home computer with a library card, or at the library, Varga said.

“It really shows how [libraries] take that federal grant and turn it into a service that benefits so many people,” she said. “We turn dollars into more dollars, by helping people start small businesses which then give back to their community. And all of these things that we say we want for veterans—a chunk of that is provided by this money and accessible through your library.”

The Central Rappahannock Regional Library—of which Fredericksburg City and Stafford, Spotsylvania, and Westmoreland counties are member jurisdictions—does not receive any direct funding that originates from the IMLS, said Sean Bonney, director of community engagement, in an email to the Advance.

However, CRRL does offer access to FindItVa and other databases supported by the Library of Virginia.

“If funding to the Library of Virginia for [these] databases ends, CRRL’s budget would not support both CRRL-provided and LVA-provided databases, and some of these services would likely discontinue,” Bonney said.

Indirect support for student learning also in jeopardy

Programs and services funded by IMLS also indirectly support public schools, said Connie Piper, executive director for the Virginia Association of School Librarians.

“We know that when our students go home for summer, as educators we don’t have them any more, so we rely on things like summer reading programs to keep kids interested and engaged in reading,” Piper said to the Advance this week. “So I think we could see some loss in reading ability from [the potential loss of summer reading programs].”

High school students and teachers also often rely on the Document Bank and FindItVa databases, which public libraries can make available to anyone with a library card through IMLS funding, to support their research and lesson planning.

“These are magazine data bases, encyclopedia databases, research data bases that some school divisions, particularly small, rural school divisions, would find it very hard to fund,” Piper said.

“We know that libraries are opportunity,” she continued. “Libraries provide free resources. [There will be an] impact on overall literacy by not having those resources available or having them limited.”

Varga said libraries are used to doing more with less.

“We have done more with less for several decades,” she said. “We know what uncertainty is like—but this is more dramatic than the uncertainty we’ve seen in the recent past.”

And she said that Virginia’s localities don’t necessarily have the funding needed to replace the federal dollars.

“So we know that libraries will have to let go of some things that are really valuable to our patrons,” she said.

Piper said libraries are one of the few institutions in this country that provide access to information and opportunity for free.

“They benefit everyone in our community,” she said. “The loss of something that has that far reaching of an impact is critical and it’s huge.”

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