2010 Chief Officer Survey Letter - draft

December 8, 2010

Dear Chief Officer:

I am writing to request your participation in the Public Libraries Survey (PLS) for fiscal year (FY) 2010 conducted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The PLS is administered as a cooperative effort of the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the U.S. Census Bureau. The PLS is an annual survey of over 9,200 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 2010 PLS to your 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 data file and survey report.

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 13, 2011
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	August 3, 2011
Group #3* (January–December)	NJ, TX	August 24, 2011

*extraordinary reporting hardship

The FY 2010 PLS has a firm due date of April 13, 2011 for group #1 states, August 3, 2011 for group #2 states, and August 24, 2011 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.

The IMLS and the Census Bureau, the data collection agent for the 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. The Census Bureau 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 you will receive electronically once your coordinator submits your final data, 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 Jennifer Scotto at 800-451-6235 or via email at [email protected].

The FY2010 data file and survey report will be released on the IMLS website at www.imls.gov. The web-based data tools (Compare Public Libraries and Search for Public Libraries) as well as all historical reports and data files are also released on this website.

If you have any questions regarding this data collection, please contact Jennifer Scotto of the Census Bureau at 800-451-6235 as soon as possible.

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 3137-0074. The time required to complete this information collection is estimated to average 85.7 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 send them to [email protected].

Sincerely,

C. Arturo Manjarrez

Associate Deputy Director for Research and Statistics

Institute of Museum and Library Services

Enclosure

State Librarian Certification of Public Library Data, FY 2010

Institute of Museum and Library Services

I hereby certify that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the data submitted by the State Data Coordinator for the Public Libraries Survey, FY 2010 are accurate.

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State Name

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State Librarian’s Name (Please print)

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State Librarian’s Signature

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Date

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