FY2016 PLS CO Advance Letter

December 2016
Dear Chief Officer:
I am writing to request your participation in the Public Libraries Survey (PLS) for fiscal year (FY) 2016
conducted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) with support from the American
Institutes for Research (AIR) as our data collection agent.
The PLS is an annual survey of approximately 9,300 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. The PLS is administered as a cooperative effort of the Chief Officers of State Library
Agencies (COSLA) and IMLS.
AIR sent the FY 2016 PLS User’s Guide to your State Data Coordinator (SDC) 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,
MO, MT, NC, NM, NV, OK, OR, RI, SC, TN, VA,
WV, WY

April 7, 2017

Group #2
(October–September,
January–December)

AL, AR, CO, DC, FL, ID, IL, IN, KS, LA, ME, MI,
MN, MS, ND, NE, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, SD, UT,
VT, WA, WI, American Samoa, Guam, Northern
Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands

July 28, 2017

TX

August 18, 2017

Group #3*
(January–December)
*Extraordinary reporting hardship

The FY 2016 PLS has a firm due date of April 7, 2017 for group #1 states, July 28, 2017 for group #2
states, and August 18, 2017 for the group #3 state. No state data submission will be accepted after the due
date specified for the state. If you cannot submit data for all of your public libraries by the due date,
please submit the data you do have available instead of not submitting data at all.
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 SDC.

IMLS and AIR will work cooperatively with your SDC, who is the contact person for the survey, to
ensure the quality and timeliness of data for your state. AIR will conduct data reviews and send their
findings of highly questionable data to the coordinator for review and corrections. 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.
The certification process will be the same for FY 2016 as it was for FY 2015. You will receive an email
from AIR in mid-December with your login credentials to access the PLS Web Portal where you will see
the status of the survey, review the data, and certify the survey. After the SDC has locked the survey and
no further revisions are needed, the PLS Web Portal will automatically send you an email informing you
that the data are locked and ready for your review and certification. Once you certify the data, you and the
SDC will receive a confirmation email that the data have been certified. After AIR completes their review
of the data and corrections are made, you will be informed when the data are final.
The FY 2016 data files and survey report will be released on the IMLS website at www.imls.gov. IMLS
will also make the data available through web-based tools, such as the IMLS data catalog.
If you have any questions regarding this data collection, please contact the PLS Help Desk at
[email protected] or 1-866-744-5746 between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm Eastern time.
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, which expires XX/XX/20XX. The time required to
complete this information collection is estimated to average 104.98 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,

Kathryn K. Matthew
Director
Institute of Museum and Library Services