April 2022 Newsletter

ARPA Grants to Vermont Public Libraries

In The Vermont Department of Libraries (VTLIB) received $2,135,819 in American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) funding through the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

In the fall of 2021, VTLIB disbursed more than $900,000 to 163 public libraries across the state through the Grants to Public Libraries for Equipment and Supply Purchases program. These funds were leveraged by local public libraries to purchase equipment so they can provide continuous library service to their communities during the COVID19 pandemic. Examples of equipment purchased include equipment like firepits, canopies, and seating to support outdoor programming during our coldest months, book bikes, and self-checkout stations.

The Catamount Library Network (CLN) and Vermont Organization of Koha Automated Libraries (VOKAL) received IMLS ARPA funds in support of technical upgrades including their transitions to Aspen. The Vermont Historical Society received IMLS ARPA funds to procure and pilot mobile scanning equipment which local historical societies can borrow to digitize their collections. This enables more Vermonters to access these collections remotely. The ABLE Library also received new equipment purchased with IMLS ARPA funds to support at-home recording of audio books by Vermont authors and with Vermont themes, which will become part of the ABLE collection and be shared more broadly with the National Library Service.

We have granted IMLS ARPA funds to the Green Mountain Library Consortium’s Listen Up Vermont (LUV) program and plan to spend approximately $240,000 on the Department of Library’s eBook and eAudiobook platform to make more titles available to Vermonters through the new Palace app.

VTLIB is in the process of making collection purchases for Vermont’s six correctional facilities. We are also currently reaching out to other state institutions we routinely support to offer a collections refresh. These purchases will aid in restoring access to print materials to these underserved community members, whose access to library materials was disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.

In the coming weeks, we will share information with the Vermont library community about a second round of IMLS ARPA funding directly to libraries. While the grant will be administered like the first round, we particularly encourage libraries to use this funding to grow their Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and New American collections as this is a rare opportunity to update physical collections using federal funds. We expect this second round to provide approximately $300,000 to public libraries.

Working Group on the Status of Libraries in Vermont

On March 25th, the Working Group on the Status of Libraries in Vermont convened its fourth meeting on the topic of Facilities. The working group members heard from library professionals from school, public, and academic libraries throughout the state. This meeting, like the three earlier meetings of the working group, can be viewed in its entirety online. Links to the written testimony and to the meeting recordings can be found here: https://libraries.vermont.gov/services/projects/working_group/testimony_record

The next meeting of the working group will be held on May 20th on the topic of Technology. A call for live testimony will go out in May.

If you would like to contribute your knowledge and expertise to the working group’s efforts, you can share written testimony on the topics of Technology, Facilities, Collections, or Programming by emailing [email protected]. (It is preferred that testimony on each topic be shared in a separate email or document.)

As always, please feel free to reach out to me and others at the Vermont Department of Libraries with questions, suggestions, and concerns! The contact information for all our team members is available here: https://libraries.vermont.gov/contact_us/directory. We enjoy hearing from you! 

VTLIB has announced the 2022-2023 nominees for all three of our Vermont youth book awards!

To see the 2022-2023 nominee list for each award, please visit the individual award pages:

• Red Clover Book Award: https://bit.ly/3tXnBGF
• Vermont Golden Dome Book Award: https://bit.ly/3qWcbRF
• Green Mountain Book Award: https://bit.ly/3tVmTKe

More 2022-2023 award materials will be added to the book award pages as we move into the spring. You can find more information about the new book award timeline here: https://bit.ly/3DvtONi

We want to give a huge thank you to the members of the Red Clover, Vermont Golden Dome, and Green Mountain Book Award reading committees for working tirelessly year-round to curate fantastic lists for the benefit of Vermont youth!

Governance & Management

EXHIBIT RECEPTION: Voices of St. Joseph's Orphanage

April 8. 1:00 – 4:00 pm. Vermont History Museum, Montpelier, VT

Join us for a reception for the latest exhibit in our Local History Gallery. Free admission and refreshments. Public remarks beginning at 2:00 pm.

The Voices of St. Joseph’s Orphanage exhibition tells the story of the former orphans, and their remarkable and enduring accomplishments. The multimedia exhibit includes photographs, documents, artifacts, and oral history selections from fifteen participants of the Restorative Inquiry and is open through July. Elements of the exhibition–including the oral history selections–can also be found on the Restorative Inquiry website: https://www.stjosephsrjinquiry.com/oralhistoryexhibition.

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Vermont Folklife Center, the St. Joseph’s Orphanage Restorative Inquiry, an initiative of the Burlington Community Justice Center, and the Vermont Historical Society; and is generously funded by the Vermont Humanities Council. 

WINTER SPEAKER SERIES: Room for Improvement: Landscape, Social Uplift, and the Changing Nature of Vermont

April 27. 12:00 pm. Zoom.

Speaker: Sara Gregg

The Vermont Commission on Country Life devised a notorious eugenics research program for the state, but its participants were simultaneously engaged in coordinating a systematic survey of the state that sought to articulate a program for the future. After more than a century of outmigration, those who had stayed behind were left reckoning with how best to support their families and communities on often-challenging terrain; it was only in the 1930s that state agencies turned their attention to planning for social and landscape change. Weaving together the threads of landscape change and state planning that oriented Gregg’s 2010 book, Managing the Mountains, this talk examines the developments that shaped the evolving economy and political culture of Vermont during a pivotal century in its transformation.

Sara M. Gregg (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an associate professor of History whose work focuses on environmental change, agricultural history, and land policy. Her current project, "Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of Homesteading on the Great Plains," examines the process of state formation in the US West from the first years in the contact zone through the several Homestead Acts and into the present. She is the author of Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale, 2010); co-editor of the anthology American Georgics: Writings on Farming, Culture, and the Land (Yale, 2011); a fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany; an associate fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies; and a co-convenor of the Women’s Environmental History Network (WHEN). 

Register for the talk here: https://form.jotform.com/213334591950153