Challenging Times for Library Institutions
Letter from the Executive Director, April 2025
The past month has seen the upending of two venerable and important institutions in our community. In the case of one, the challenges were systemic and long-running. In the other, the changes are more abrupt, disruptive and—as yet—undefined. In this era of tumult, we all need to remain focused on the value these organizations provide and how they can either be preserved or absorbed into other spaces, if at all.
Last week, the Special Libraries Association (SLA) announced it was dissolving. For more than 115 years, SLA has served a niche segment of members of the library community who work in corporate, government, or other specialized environments. For many years in my career, I attended the SLA conferences, which were at the time as robust and as well-attended as any other large library community gathering. It was a vibrant community, albeit one that had slightly different needs and expectations of information management. The association’s dissolution is a signal of how many aspects of information resourcing and internal information management have transformed. Equally altered is the respect for the skills and organizations that support those systems.
In many corporate environments, the functions of the library have passed to purchasing departments, and the perceptions of the need for curation have faltered behind the notion that one can get access to everything, if only for slightly more than one previously paid for a smaller, more curated slice of the content available. While other special libraries, notably government libraries, remain a robust and somewhat distinct community, they too have recently been targeted for cost-cutting and reductions. Understanding the value that these divisions provide to their parent organizations remains critical. Even without SLA and its organizing role, the unique needs of records management, asset management, internal content discovery, and interoperability will remain and may grow even more urgent in our increasingly digital corporate environments.
Also this month, another important organization, the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), has been targeted for dissolution. The situation with IMLS is quite different from that of SLA. The White House has declared that the agency should be diminished, if not completely dissolved, to the greatest extent possible. This is a short-sighted and painful swipe at the library community from the executive branch of government. While this is not the most important metric, the amount of federal funding directed toward IMLS is 0.0044% the federal budget. To give a sense of scale, that is roughly the approximate percentage of the time in Earth’s geological history during which humans have existed as a species, or alternatively, the percentage representing the wealthiest 165 people in the entire population of Los Angeles. However, in terms of its impact on the public library community, the amount is significant. The value of IMLS funding for grants to state libraries represents roughly 10% of all state library funding passed to local institutions.
Over the years, NISO has not been a major recipient of funding from IMLS. A significant National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded in 2022 supports the Cooperative Collections Lifecycle Project (CCLP); prior to this, the last IMLS grant that NISO received was in 2007. However, IMLS has played an important role in supporting the work of standards development and implementation. IMLS has funded many projects to advance standards-related work, including projects on accessibility, usage data, archives, digital books in audio and video formats, social cataloging, resource sharing, digital lending, digital preservation, and interlibrary loan. Some of these initiatives built directly upon NISO work or were closely related to efforts NISO has been involved in.
More importantly, IMLS is an important funder of national initiatives to advance library efficiency and increase the impact of library services. It has provided catalyst funding for projects that no single institution could undertake or advance individually. Much like the work of standards development, many of these initiatives are public goods that many may benefit from but few can achieve alone. While the larger projects involve a dollar-for-dollar match that includes significant in-kind contributions from partner organizations, without the generous federal support, many of these initiatives wouldn’t get off the ground.
The board of the IMLS, which advises the director and provides strategic input on decision-making, wrote an open letter to the new acting director. In that letter, the board described not only the important mission of the organization, but the grounding of most of IMLS’s activities in law, with specific allocated funding for each initiative. (The main activities of IMLS, including the Grants to States program, the Leadership Grants programs, and data collections, are required by law). In the White House Executive Order targeting IMLS and other agencies, instructions were given that agencies should “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.” In a blog post worth reading, the EveryLibrary Institute put together a useful and detailed exploration of the distinctions about legislative use of the wording “shall” and “may.”
This administration has shown a willingness to push the boundaries of legal interpretations of required activities under the cover of “efficiency” or “reorganization.” What actions the administration might take remains unclear. It is, however, concerning that IMLS, along with many other organizations in the federal government, is a target. Fundamentally, the fate of IMLS and its funding are directly the responsibility of Congress. In the past, there has been broad bipartisan legislative support for libraries and their (very modest) federal funding needs. The US Senators who sponsored the bipartisan 2018 Museum and Library Services Act wrote a letter supporting this position and “remind[ing] the Administration of its obligation to faithfully execute the provisions of the law as authorized.” Legislators on both sides of the aisle generally recognize that many communities, particularly in rural areas, rely heavily on funding from IMLS to maintain library services. People can see a visualization of or read about how funding from IMLS might have impacted their own community. Given the already limited and decreasing resources for libraries and library services, it would be a self-made catastrophe if the government were to end federal support for libraries.
Ideally, people will recognize the impact and value of cooperative action. And while there are always needs for efficiency and cost-savings, diminishing funding isn’t always the best route to achieving those goals. Of course, standards are one approach to savings and greater effectiveness. Thoughtfully considering a process, learning from industry partners, and the experience of others are core elements of standards-setting work. NISO is also a critical point of connection between communities, even as other organizations falter. Much of our work is founded on public-private partnerships and driven by consensus among many types of entities, public institutions, private academic libraries, for-profit corporations, societies, software developers, and many, many others. While the combination of perspectives may make some of the conversations challenging at times, it makes their outcomes more meaningful and stronger.
Sincerely,
Todd Carpenter
Executive Director, NISO
