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Washington Evening Journal
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Washington, IA 52353
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How Important are LSTA Funds to the Washington Public Library?
AT THE LIBRARY
By Cary Ann Siegfried, at Washington Public Library
Mar. 26, 2025 12:03 pm
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
Because of the recent Executive Order signed on March 14 to eliminate or reduce the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), we've had some questions recently about whether our library receives federal funding through the IMLS. The quick answer is no, we do not receive federal dollars that we can spend in our budget. The real answer is a little more complicated.
The IMLS administers the Grants to States program which is authorized through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). The LSTA was enacted in 1996 and the Grants to States program uses a population based formula to distribute more than $160 million among the State Library Administrative Agencies (SLAAs) every year (the entire budget of the IMLS is about $295 million, this makes up over half the IMLS budget). SLAAs are official agencies charged by law with the extension and development of library services and generally are the state libraries in each state. SLAAs may use the funds to support statewide initiatives and services, and they may also distribute the funds through competitive subawards to, or cooperative agreements with, public, academic, research, school, or special libraries or consortia (for-profit and federal libraries are not eligible). In Iowa, the funds have most recently been spent on statewide initiatives that impact virtually every public library in the state.
The State Library of Iowa, over the last few years has averaged about $2.1 million dollars annually in LSTA funding (this is a little less than half their annual budget). The attached images (provided by the State Library of Iowa) outline how this funding is spent. So while we do not receive actual federal dollars in our annual budget, LSTA funds provide us many FREE and SEAMLESS services that our patrons use every day. Here are some highlights:
- Probably the service most important to many of you that is funded by LSTA funds is the Bridges (i.e. Libby) eBook, eAudiobook and eMagazine service. Each month over 2,000 items are checked out on Libby by WPL patrons. The platform fee and magazine collection is paid with LSTA funds while content fees (i.e. purchases of e-books and eAudiobooks) are paid by the libraries who participate in the service.
- Because of LSTA funding, we were able to remove the $2 fee for most Interlibrary Loans because of the FREE courier service provided — so you get whatever book you want from anywhere in the state — sometimes in just days. Last year we processed over 700 interlibrary loan requests for our patrons and loaned over 100 books to other libraries.
- Our library event calendar, program registration service, meeting room booking and Wi-Fi monitoring system is provided FREE.
- Our website hosting and content management system (and the training to maintain it) is FREE to us.
- LSTA also funds the structure and marketing materials provided by the State Library for our Summer Reading program.
- The professional development offered by the State of Iowa to new library directors and staff is invaluable, especially in small towns where there may not be anyone local to train the new director.
Yes, most of the items listed above are replaceable, though at a cost — our library could purchase our own calendar and event system; we could host our own web server and buy a content management system; we could create our own summer reading theme and design and could package ILL books and send them through the USPS. Of course, we would need additional local funding and quite a bit of staff time to manage all of this, both the initial implementation as well as the ongoing tasks.
Unfortunately, the Bridges consortium is not likely to survive in its current form and quality with a loss of LSTA funds. Certainly, the platform fee could be split between participating libraries, but it’s likely that this would place Bridges participation out of the price range for many libraries and the loss in participation would make it even more difficult for all of us to afford. This service is exactly the type of offering that LSTA funds were intended for — to bring digital services to states with a high rural population.
At this point, it’s important to stress that the LSTA Grants for States program has NOT been discontinued. This program is required by statute and the way the Executive Order was stated, the intention was to reduce IMLS functions to those that are required by statute. And the most recent appropriations bill has funded the IMLS through September 2025. This is an issue that public libraries across the state of Iowa will be watching closely. The Washington Public Library is funded primarily through City of Washington property tax revenue, with smaller allocations from Washington County and from the Washington Free Public Library Foundation. You can find the full explanation of LSTA funding at the State Library of Iowa site here: https://statelibraryofiowa.gov/funding-grants/federal-lsta-funding
