FOIA request success: The IMLS publishes grant submissions

From: [name] [mailto:[address]@IMLS.GOV]
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2009 11:55 AM
Subject: FOIA 09-15

Ms. [sic] Lee,

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has received your on-line e-mail request for information regarding “[r]ecently-funded Connecting to Collections grant applications….”

In response to your request and stated desire to obtain information electronically, I have coordinated with the Office of Museum Services to expedite its normal process of updating the agency’s website so that the requested grant information is made available to the public.  That process is now complete, therefore, I have provided you a link below to assist you in obtaining the requested information.

http://www.imls.gov/collections/grants/planning.htm

I note that the IMLS FOIA Officer has determined that all information contained on the agency’s website is appropriate for release.  There is no fee for providing this information.

Thank you for your interest in the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Respectfully

[name]
Senior Paralegal Specialist/FOIA Processor
Office of the General Counsel
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)
1800 M Street, NW (9th Floor)
Washington, DC 20036-5802
[phone number]
[fax number] (Fax)

How did this come about?

On March 4, 2009 I wrote the program the senior program officer to learn what arrangements I needed to make in order to visit their offices in Washington to read the other awarded Connecting to Collections Statewide Planning Grants.

This is the purpose of the grants, as the IMLS describes on their site:

Statewide Planning Grants, an important component of the Connecting to Collections initiative, foster partnerships among organizations in a state, commonwealth, or territory to implement recommendations of the Heritage Health Index (HHI), which recommends that collections in the public trust should:

• provide safe conditions for their collections;
• develop an emergency plan;
• assign responsibility for collections care; and
• work together to increase public and private support for, and raise public awareness about, collections care.

Surely reading what other states were planning to do would be a good way to understand efforts across the country.

I received this reply:

As for reading funded proposals, we don’t really have a reading room for that type of thing.  If you want, you can request as many funded projects as you are interested in to be sent to you via the freedom of information act http://www.imls.gov/about/foia.shtm.

This was quite a surprise for several reasons, including (1) the grants had already been awarded; (2) there was nothing secretive about their content; (3) they were small ($40,000 or less); (4) they were decidedly non-political in nature; and, (5) this is a public agency awarding tax dollars.

Believing that there was both a principle that mattered and a practical application that would serve others, I submitted this FOIA request:

I was surprised to learn that these aren’t (1) available online; (2) made available by e-mail upon request; (3) made available in paper form upon (reasonable) request; or finally (4) available to view on-site if someone drives to your offices in Washington to read them.

Given the fact that all of these are in electronic form, and publishing them is literally free (via the web), one would expect that this would be the standard once the awarding of public funds is announced.

That you can’t even read them on-site. . . Well, that’s pretty exasperating. So, if a FOIA request is the only way I and others in my community and state might learn from those in other states with the same goal, then that’s what I’m submitting.

In terms of fees, $5.00 should cover the staff time required to e-mail the documents or upload them to a free public site such as scribd.com, which is already widely used throughout the Federal government for hundreds of thousands of documents.

Thanks for your help.

A little more than a month later I received the message above reporting that the IMLS had now published the awards from this year and last year online.

Thanks to the willingness of the IMLS to revise their existing practice, it is now easier for institutions across the country to learn what others are doing in the area of collection assessment and care.

In fact, the February 19 press release from the IMLS announcing these awards made just this point:

I applaud these grantees as they take action to combat the crises in collections care that threaten to rob our heritage, said Anne-Imelda Radice, IMLS Director.  They represent a wide array of approaches to planning, from a system of conservation circuit-riders in Virginia working with small institutions across the state to the first-ever statewide preservation assessment of material culture collections in Utah.

They’ve now made this possible for all via the web.

An earlier post listed the grants by state and described the way in which several institutions throughout Wyoming collaborated online in the development of their successful grant submission.  Another provided full online access to the submission and timeline for Massachusetts’s successful award.