#Institute of Museum and Library Services

[lakecountylibrary]

🔥 The beacons are lit; the library calls for aid

The Trump administration has issued an executive order aimed at dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services - the ONLY federal agency for America's libraries.

Using just 0.003% of the federal budget, the IMLS funds services at libraries across the country; services like Braille and talking books for the visually impaired, high-speed internet access, and early literacy programs.

Libraries are known for doing more with less, but even we can't work with nothing.

How You Can Help:

🔥 Call your congressperson!

Use the app of your choice or look 'em up here: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Pro tip: If your phone anxiety is high, call at night and leave a voicemail. You can even write yourself a script in advance and read it off. Heck, read them this post if you want to.

Phones a total no-go? The American Library Association has a form for you: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577

🔥Tell your friends!

Tell strangers, for that matter. People in line at the check out, your elderly neighbor, the mail carrier - no one is safe from your library advocacy. Libraries are for everyone and we need all the help we can get.

...Wait, why do we need this IMLS thing again?

The ALA says it best in their official statement and lists some ways libraries across the country use IMLS funding:

But if you want a really specific answer, here at LCPL we use IMLS funding to provide our amazing interlibrary loan service. If we can't purchase an item you request (out of print books, for example) this service lets us borrow it from another library and check it out to you.

IMLS also funds the statewide Indiana Digital Library and Evergreen Indiana, which gives patrons of smaller Indiana libraries access to collections just as large and varied as the big libraries' collections.

As usual, cutting this funding will hurt rural communities the most - but every library user will feel it one way or another. Let's let Congress know that's unacceptable.

[saywhat-politics]

Librarians have a bone to pick with President Donald Trump.

On Monday, the Institute of Museum and Library Services placed its entire staff on administrative leave at the Trump administration’s behest ― a move that comes two weeks after the president proposed eliminating the IMLS as part of his ongoing efforts to slash the federal government’s workforce and funding.

That matters to local librarians because the majority of libraries’ federal funding comes from the IMLS. Of the agency’s $290 million budget, about $160 million goes directly to the nation’s libraries, where it’s used to develop literacy programs, workforce training and civic engagement initiatives. Museums and archives get a cut of IMLS funding, too.

As The New York Times reports,the IMLS ― which employs roughly 70 people ― also provides competitive grants directly to libraries of various type: Recently, that’s included things like $250,000 to the Seattle Public Library to support teen mental health and $150,000 to the University of South Florida to develop library resources for autistic patrons.

The American Library Association called the proposed budget cuts “short-sighted” and an “assault” by the Trump administration that would be deeply felt throughout local communities.

“By eliminating the only federal agency dedicated to funding library services, the Trump administration’s executive order is cutting off at the knees the most beloved and trusted of American institutions and the staff and services they offer,” it said.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkump Linkdump

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY next MONDAY (Mar 24), and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire, which meant I spent all day yesterday running around like a headless chicken, trying to get home in time for my gig in San Diego on Monday (don't worry, I sorted it):

https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

Therefore, this is 30th linkdump, in which I collect the assorted links that didn't make it into this week's newsletters. Here are the other 29:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I always like to start and end these 'dumps with some good news, which isn't easy in these absolutely terrifying times. But there is some good news: Wil Wheaton has announced his new podcast, a successor of sorts to the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. It's called "It's Storytime" and it features Wil reading his favorite stories handpicked from science fiction magazines, including On Spec, the magazine that bought my very first published story (I was 16, it ran in their special youth issue, it wasn't very good, but boy did it mean a lot to me):

https://wilwheaton.net/podcast/

Here's some more good news: a court has found (again!) that works created by AI are not eligible for copyright. This is the very best possible outcome for people worried about creators' rights in the age of AI, because if our bosses can't copyright the botshit that comes out of the "AI" systems trained on our work, then they will pay us:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-appeals-court-rejects-copyrights-171203999.html

Our bosses hate paying us, but they hate the idea of not being able to stop people from copying their entertainment products so! much! more! It's that simple:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

This outcome is so much better than the idea that AI training isn't fair use – an idea that threatens the existence of search engines, archiving, computational linguistics, and other clearly beneficial activities. Worse than that, though: if we create a new copyright that allows creators to prevent others from scraping and analyzing their works, our bosses will immediately alter their non-negotiable boilerplate contracts to demand that we assign them this right. That will allow them to warehouse huge troves of copyrighted material that they will sell to AI companies who will train models designed to put us on the breadline (see above, re: our bosses hate paying us):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/13/hey-look-over-there/#lets-you-and-he-fight

The rights of archivists grow more urgent by the day, as the Trump regime lays waste to billions of dollars worth of government materials that were produced at public expense, deleting decades of scientific, scholarly, historical and technical materials. This is the kind of thing you might expect the National Archive or the Library of Congress to take care of, but they're being chucked into the meat-grinder as well.

To make things even worse, Trump and Musk have laid waste to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a tiny, vital agency that provides funding to libraries, archives and museums across the country. Evan Robb writes about all the ways the IMLS supports the public in his state of Washington:

Technology support. Last-mile broadband connection, network support, hardware, etc. Assistance with the confusing e-rate program for reduced Internet pricing for libraries.

Coordinated group purchase of e-books, e-audiobooks, scholarly research databases, etc.

Library services for the blind and print-disabled.

Libraries in state prisons, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric institutions.

Digitization of, and access to, historical resources (e.g., newspapers, government records, documents, photos, film, audio, etc.).

Literacy programming and support for youth services at libraries.

The entire IMLS budget over the next 10 years rounds to zero when compared to the US federal budget – and yet, by gutting it, DOGE is amputating significant parts of the country's systems that promote literacy; critical thinking; and universal access to networks, media and ideas. Put it that way, and it's not hard to see why they hate it so.

Trying to figure out what Trump is up to is (deliberately) confusing, because Trump and Musk are pursuing a chaotic agenda that is designed to keep their foes off-balance:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-donald-trump-chaos/

But as Hamilton Nolan writes, there's a way to cut through the chaos and make sense of it all. The problem is that there are a handful of billionaires who have so much money that when they choose chaos, we all have to live with it:

The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-underlying-problem

We actually have a body of law designed to prevent this from happening. It's called "antitrust" and 40 years ago, Jimmy Carter decided to follow the advice of some of history's dumbest economists who said that fighting monopolies made the economy "inefficient." Every president since, up to – but not including – Biden, did even more to encourage monopolization and the immense riches it creates for a tiny number of greedy bastards.

But Biden changed that. Thanks to the "Unity Taskforce" that divided up the presidential appointments between the Democrats' corporate wing and the Warren/Sanders wing, Biden appointed some of the most committed, effective trustbusters we'd seen for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

After Trump's election, there was some room for hope that Trump's FTC would continue to pursue at least some of the anti-monopoly work of the Biden years. After all, there's a sizable faction within the MAGA movement that hates (some) monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists

But last week, Trump claimed to have illegally fired the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC: Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. I stan both of these commissioners, hard. When they were at the height of their powers in the Biden years, I had the incredible, disorienting experience of getting out of bed, checking the headlines, and feeling very good about what the government had just done.

Trump isn't legally allowed to fire Bedoya and Slaughter. Perhaps he's just picking this fight as part of his chaos agenda (see above). But there are some other pretty good theories about what this is setting up. In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller proposes that Trump is using this case as a wedge, trying to set a precedent that would let him fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-trump-tried-to-fire-federal-trade

But perhaps there's more to it. Stoller just had Commissioner Bedoya on Organized Money, the podcast he co-hosts with David Dayen, and Bedoya pointed out that if Trump can fire Democratic commissioners, he can also fire Republican commissioners. That means that if he cuts a shady deal with, say, Jeff Bezos, he can order the FTC to drop its case against Amazon and fire the Republicans on the commission if they don't frog when he jumps:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/trumps-showdown-at-the-ftc-with-commissioner

(By the way, Organized Money is a fantastic podcast, notwithstanding the fact that they put me on the show last week:)

https://audio.buzzsprout.com/6f5ly01qcx6ijokbvoamr794ht81

The future that our plutocrat overlords are grasping for is indeed a terrible one. You can see its shape in the fantasies of "liberatarian exit" – the seasteads, free states, and other assorted attempts to build anarcho-capitalist lawless lands where you can sell yourself into slavery, or just sell your kidneys. The best nonfiction book on libertarian exit is Raymond Criab's 2022 "Adventure Capitalism," a brilliant, darkly hilarious and chilling history of every time a group of people have tried to found a nation based on elevating selfishness to a virtue:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

If Craib's book is the best nonfiction volume on the subject of libertarian exit, then Naomi Kritzer's super 2023 novel Liberty's Daughter is the best novel about life in a libertopia – a young adult novel about a girl growing up in the hell that would be life with a Heinlein-type dad:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

But now this canon has a third volume, a piece of design fiction from Atelier Van Lieshout called "Slave City," which specs out an arcology populated with 200,000 inhabitants whose "very rational, efficient and profitable" arrangements produce €7b/year in profit:

https://www.archdaily.com/30114/slave-city-atelier-van-lieshout

This economic miracle is created by the residents' "voluntary" opt-in to a day consisting of 7h in an office, 7h toiling in the fields, 7h of sleep, and 3h for "leisure" (e.g. hanging out at "The Mall," a 24/7, 26-storey " boundless consumer paradise"). Slaves who wish to better themselves can attend either Female Slave University or Male Slave University (no gender controversy in Slave City!), which run 24/7, with 7 hours of study, 7 hours of upkeep and maintenance on the facility, 7h of sleep, and, of course, 3h of "leisure."

The field of design fiction is a weird and fertile one. In his traditional closing keynote for this year's SXSW Interactive festival, Bruce Sterling opens with a little potted history of the field since it was coined by Julian Bleeker:

https://bruces.medium.com/how-to-rebuild-an-imaginary-future-2025-0b14e511e7b6

Then Bruce moves on to his own latest design fiction project, an automated poetry machine called the Versificatore first described by Primo Levi in an odd piece of science fiction written for a newspaper. The Versificatore was then adapted to the screen in 1971, for an episode of an Italian sf TV show based on Levi's fiction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tva-D_8b8-E

And now Sterling has built a Versificatore. The keynote is a sterlingian delight – as all of his SXSW closers are. It's a hymn to the value of "imaginary futures" and an instruction manual for recovering them. It could not be more timely.

Sterling's imaginary futures would be a good upbeat note to end this 'dump with, but I've got a real future that's just as inspiring to close us out with: the EU has found Apple guilty of monopolizing the interfaces to its devices and have ordered the company to open them up for interoperability, so that other manufacturers – European manufacturers! – can make fully interoperable gadgets that are first-class citizens of Apple's "ecosystem":

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-ordered-by-eu-antitrust-regulators-open-up-rivals-2025-03-19/

It's a good reminder that as America crumbles, there are still places left in the world with competent governments that want to help the people they represent thrive and prosper. As the Prophet Gibson tells us, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." Let's hope that the EU is living in America's future, and not the other way around.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/22/omnium-gatherum/#storytime

Image: TDelCoro https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomasdelcoro/48116604516/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[sswslitinmotion]

April 6-12, 2025, is National Library Week. Check the link for the suggestions and events per the American Library Association.

Contact congressional reps to protect federal funds for libraries, especially as the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is in serious trouble. -- ssw15.

[the-nosferatu-library]

So you know how we're an unconventional library, right?

Unfortunately, with how things are going, we might end up without the good old physical libraries. Why? Because of Trump, of course.

One of his Executive Orders is defunding the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

We cannot let that happen and need your help.

Sign this petition and share this as much as you can.

Big thank you to Mythe from the Research team for bringing this to our attention.

[pettytiredandjewish]

IMPORTANT

Hey- To those who works in museums and libraries:

Trump just signed an executive order to dismantle the institute of museum and library services

(and six other federal agencies: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency.)

Please spread the word

[panicinthestudio]

The Brain Scoop - Trump is gutting museums and libraries, April 10, 2025

The Brain Scoop is a registered trademark of the Field Museum. Used with permission.

Donald Trump's move to entirely eliminate the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) here in the United States would be an act of monumental neglect. The tax dollars that the IMLS redistributes comes down to less than $1 per person in the United States, and goes on to fund countless programs at more than 155,000 public institutions across the country.

Updates & Resources:

American Library Association: https://www.ala.org/faq-executive-order-targeting-imls

American Alliance of Museums: https://www.aam-us.org/2025/01/28/impact-of-executive-orders-and-pause-on-disbursement-of-federal-funds/

[joe-england]

IMLS staff put on administrative leave : NPR

"The Institute of Museum and Library Studies accounts for less than $300 million (0.0046%) of the federal budget, yet it supports a thriving sector that generates over $50 billion in economic benefits and sustains more than 726,000 jobs nationwide. There is simply no justifiable reason to eliminate it." - Rep. Nadler

[lakecountylibrary]

That's a nice interlibrary loan service you have there.

Be a shame if something were to happen to it.

If this is the first you're hearing of it, here are more details on what's going on with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and how you can help.

And here's that link from the end card: ala.org/showup

--

[Video Description: A librarian frantically unloading books from a cart full of Interlibrary Loan bags marked Info Express. The clip is sped up to 1.5 speed and "Flight of the Bumblebee" is playing in the background. He shelves books as fast as he can onto the library holds shelf, occasionally fumbling one, while another librarian very calmly and slowly checks the items off on a clipboard.

The music stops abruptly and we cut to a shelf of books with one of the interlibrary loan bags displayed prominently in front. The librarian who was shelving slides the books away so we can see him through the shelf. He says "Lake County Public Library borrows and lends over 800 items a month using our interlibrary loan service - a service only possible thanks to IMLS." He slides the books back into place with gusto.

"Flight of the Bumblebee" resumes as the end card appears, reading Support Your Libraries and Museums! Tell Congress to Save IMLS! Visit ala.org/showup to see how you can help. /description]

Music Credit: Composition: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Performer: US Army Band, Public Domain

[archivlibrarianist]

While some organizations have capitulated to executive order strong-arming, the IMLS is among those who have responded with, "Fuck you; make us."

From the article linked:

"In a March 24 letter to Sonderling, who was installed as IMLS acting director last week, the board, in its 'statutory capacity,' offered a lengthy list of duties set out in the 'Museum and Library Services Act of 2018,' that cannot be 'paused, reduced, or eliminated without violating Congressional intent and federal statute.'”  

You can read the letter to Director Sonderling here. The ALA also has a copy available at their site.

[pettytiredandjewish]

To all my Jews who works in museums and libraries/relies on this agency (or currently working on degrees in these fields):

Trump just signed an executive order to dismantle the institute of museum and library services.

The institute of museum and library services is a federal agency that provides funding, support, and resources to museums, libraries, and archives in the United States.

And if anyone of you also works or relies on these other six federal agencies, he is also dismantling them too:

Trump signed an executive order to dismantle seven federal agencies: the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency.

[recherche-raptor]

DOGE is attempting to shut down the Institute of Museum and Library Services for good. Online outcry on reddit and bluesky slowed the shutdown to the point that employees have not yet been fired. This post is news from an IMLS employee about what is currently happening to the agency and to its employees. Call your congresspeople, speak out on social media, speak out to news media to try to get them to talk about this

[lakecountylibrary]

[ID: The Disability Pride flag /ID]

Happy Disability Pride Month! Here's your reminder that the Indiana State Library, in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), provides the Talking Book and Braille Library FREE to Indiana residents who can't read standard print due to disability.

They will mail you materials, including braille ereaders, large print and braille books, and specialized audio players. They also have a digital library that you can use on your own device.

You can check them out and apply for services at https://www.in.gov/library/tbbl/!