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How much money are they actually giving out here? How many local libraries are going to disappear because they don't have federal grants?
You can search their list of awarded grants here (https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded-grants) and for calibration's sake I looked up the town whose library I spent the most time in as a wee one, wandering the stacks. Looks like that library has received zilch from the IMLS. They did give a local wildlife park near the town $1,775 back in 2003, and the local "Pioneer Farm Museum" (which is just a little farm all done up in historical style where kids can take a trip and learn how to churn butter or whatever) got $6,370 in 2002. That's it.
Searching around, they seem to give out a lot of $10,000 grants to native tribes, presumably for village libraries. So where is the big money?
So I went ahead and searched for Tacoma, which was the closest city to where I grew up that had proper museums, big ones that people like to go to. What did I find? $400k to the University of Washington, $630k to something called "Environment & Culture Partners" which appears to be an NGO that tries to get museums to talk more about climate change, $170k to the Museum of Glass (a great museum I must admit, check it out if you're in Tacoma), $250k for the Children's Museum, $145k for the 9th and 10th Horse Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers Museum (never heard of it), $140k to the Washington State Historical Society, and $25,000 (Back in 2014) to the Pierce County Library System (which, come to think of it, my hometown library was part of. Still, 25k spread over all the libraries in Pierce County is kind of small potatoes).
My test seems like a mixed bag, since the Glass Museum and Children's Museum were pretty nice to go to as a kid (and even today, for the glass one). On the other hand, shouldn't a big city like Tacoma be able to support their own museums? I doubt either of these places would close their doors without the IMLS in any case: the Museum of glass got exactly two grants, one in 2024 and one in 2006, so I doubt they're relying on the money to stay open. Meanwhile it seems like a lot of this money gets funneled to universities and NGOs.
The buffalo soldiers museum well might- this is presumably a super-woke museum about black soldiers which alienated people who like woke shit by being about soldiers(who earned their stripes beating up Indians) and alienated people who like museums about soldiers by being woke.
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An additional bit of info: for 2024 their largest grantees were:
California State Library: $15,705,702
Texas State Library and Archives Commission: $12,512,132
State Library of Florida: $9,533,426
New York State Library: $8,125,215
Pennsylvania Office of Commonwealth Libraries: $5,891,819
The big grantees are all state libraries, looks like they give a grant to each state. The lowest state library grant? Wyoming State Library, $1,220,427.
The smallest grant of 2024? $2,510 to the Seneca Nation of Indians, in a grant they will use for a "Kid's Reading Project".
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