Chief Officer participation in the 2013 Public Libraries Survey

December, 2013
Dear Chief Officer:
I am writing to request your participation in the Public Libraries Survey (PLS) for fiscal year (FY) 2013
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 provided the FY 2013 PLS User’s Guide to your State Data Coordinator at the SDC Annual Meeting.
For those unable to attend we mailed the guide 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 9, 2014

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 30, 2014

Group #3*
(January–December)

NJ, TX

August 20, 2014

*extraordinary reporting hardship

The FY 2013 PLS has a firm due date of April 9, 2014 for group #1 states, July 30, 2014 for
group #2 states, and August 20, 2014 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 be able to fax or scan and
email once your coordinator submits your final data, providing you with the opportunity to certify the accuracy of
your data submission.
The FY2013 data files 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 Andrea Arroyo or Regina Padgett of the
Census Bureau at 800-451-6235 or via email at [email protected].
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 80.3 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
Director of Planning, Research and Evaluation
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Enclosure

State Librarian Certification of Public Library Data, FY 2013

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 2013 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:

Please fax this form toll free to:
PLS Census Staff @ 866-394-0138
Or
Scan and email to: [email protected]

Hours