Cover letter to Chief Officers of State Library Agencies

December 11, 2007

Dear Chief Officer:

I am writing to request your participation in the Public Libraries Survey (PLS) for fiscal year (FY) 2007, conducted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through the Federal-State Cooperative System (FSCS) for Public Library Data. IMLS is authorized to collect these data under 20 U.S.C. sec. 9108.

The PLS is administered as a cooperative effort of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA), the U.S. Census Bureau, and the IMLS. The PLS is an annual survey of over 9,000 public libraries in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the outlying areas. The survey requests descriptive information about public libraries, including staffing, revenues, expenditures, circulation, collections, public service hours, and electronic resources. Your participation will increase the availability of these data to interested users in the public and private sectors.

We mailed the FY 2007 PLS to your FSCS State Data Coordinator this week. States have been placed into one of three reporting groups (see table below) based on their fiscal cycles and extraordinary reporting hardship, in order to stagger data submissions and thus enable timelier processing and release of the survey report and data file.

Reporting group and fiscal cycle	States and U.S. territories	Survey due date
Group #1 (July–June)	AK, AZ, CA, CT, DE, GA, HI, IA, KY, MA, MD, MT, NC, NM, NV, OK, OR, RI, SC, TN, VA, WV, WY	April 17, 2008
Group #2 (October–September, January–December)	AL, AR, CO, DC, FL, ID, IL, IN, KS, LA, ME, MI, MN, MO, MS, ND, NE, NH, NY, OH, PA, SD, UT, VT, WA, WI, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands	July 31, 2008
Group #3* (January–December)	NJ, TX	August 28, 2008

*extraordinary reporting hardship

The FY 2007 PLS has a firm due date of April 17, 2008 for group #1 states, July 31, 2008 for group #2 states, and August 28, 2008 for group #3 states. No state data submission will be accepted after the due date specified for the state. Please note: If you cannot submit data for all of your public libraries by the due date, please submit the data you do have available, in lieu of no data submission.

The Francis Keppel Award for timely and accurate submission of data is based on a point system covering timely response to the original submission and post-submission processing. States that accumulate at least 16 points out of the maximum 20 points will receive the award. The point system is defined in Attachment D of the letter sent to the State Data Coordinator.

IMLS and the Census Bureau, the data collection agent for IMLS, will work cooperatively with your state data coordinator, who is the contact person for the survey, to ensure the quality and timeliness of data for your state. Census will conduct edit follow-up and send their findings of highly questionable data to the coordinator for review. Any highly questionable data that are not revised or verified as correct within three weeks of the date of the letter will be deleted and imputed.

We have enclosed an example of the State Librarian certification form that your coordinator will present to you for signing when your final data are ready for submission, providing you with the opportunity to certify the accuracy of your data submission. If you have comments or concerns regarding the status of your data submission, please contact Cynthia Ramsey at 1-800-451-6235 or via email at [email protected].

As you probably know, the survey will be transferred to IMLS on October 1, 2007. The FY2007 survey report and data file will be released on their website at www.imls.gov. The web-based data tools (Compare Public Libraries and Search for Public Libraries) and all historical reports and data files will also reside on their website after the transfer.

If you have any questions regarding this data collection, please contact [TBD] as soon as possible. [TBD] is also available to answer any questions you may have regarding the survey.

According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, no person should be asked to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. The valid OMB control number for this information collection is 3137-XXXX. The time required to complete this information collection is estimated to average 40 hours per response, including the time to review instructions, search existing data resources, gather the data needed, and complete and review the information collection. If you have any comments concerning the accuracy of the time estimate(s) or suggestions for improving this collection of information, please write to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 1800 M Street NW, 9^th Floor, Washington DC 20036-5802.

Sincerely,

Enclosure

State Librarian Certification of Public Library Data, FY 2007

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Federal-State Cooperative System (FSCS)

for Public Library Data

I hereby certify that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the data submitted by the FSCS State Data Coordinator for the Public Libraries Survey, FY 2007 are accurate.

___________________________

State Name

__________________________________________________

State Librarian’s Name (Please print)

___________________________________________________

State Librarian’s Signature

_______________________

Date

Estimated number of hours State Data Coordinator took to complete the survey:	Hours

Please fax this form toll free to:

PLS Staff @ xxxxxxxxx