A Trump administration effort to remove the federal government from wide swaths of American life continues to spread. Libraries and museums in Illinois and Bloomington-Normal will also feel the impact.
Among the many federal agencies President Trump has ordered to shut down is the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a small department that supplies grant funding and research for cultural institutions in all 50 states. The Bloomington and Normal Public libraries, Milner Library at Illinois State University, the McLean County Museum of History, and the Children’s Discovery Museum in Normal have all benefited from the agency.
Children’s Discovery Museum Director Beth Whisman said they’ve been told the government will not honor reimbursement for the third year of a $250,000 grant. Whisman estimated the museum is on the hook for about $40,000 already spent. The program serves 1,900 children in both major school districts, the YWCA, and Heartland Head Start early childhood STEAM education.
“That is a robust program. It's not just field trips. We are going into the schools, into the agencies. We're working with their families. We work with the Normal Public Library for a literacy component," said Whisman, adding the museum foundation is working to help fill the gap on this year's program.
“What we can't do, what doesn't serve our community, is to turn around to all of these teachers and these families and these children and say, 'Yeah, we're going to cancel everything else because they've built their curriculum and their plans and their schedules and their field trips, their budget around what we have helped make available to them,'” said Whisman.
To continue the effort means raising a couple million bucks for the endowment. Whisman said they are talking with school districts and other partners about cost sharing in the future.
Libraries
The Normal Public Library has received similar grants, including more than $12,000 for Code Club programming in STEAM education. Library director John Fischer said that tends to benefit people in private and home schools who don’t have access to other STEAM efforts.
There’s a much bigger potential statewide impact, though. The institute offers $5.7 million a year to more than 200 libraries in Illinois. Among other things, it funds what’s called RAILS, the Reaching Across Illinois Libraries System. Fischer said it’s an inter-library loan program when libraries don’t own an item, or if it’s checked out when a patron wants it.
“Statewide, it's 11 million items that are being delivered by vans that you see driving around to different communities, transporting boxes. Normal Public Library receives just over 40,000 items a year," said Fischer.
Fischer said rural libraries will likely be hit harder if that service ends because they have smaller collections.
Bloomington Library director Jeanne Hamilton said BPL had about 5,000 items delivered through the program last year. Hamilton said the institute also supports less tangible, but still important, resources.
“IMLS provides funding to institutions like the University of Illinois for important literacy research, resulting in toolkits and training to improve library and literacy services throughout the country. A loss of that research could impact literacy rates and services for years to come,” said Hamilton.
A lot of that research tries to figure out how children learn, said Whisman.
“There's research that has come through these grants that makes it clear that just because a kid experiences something on a screen, you could show a child how to build something with Legos, and not every child is going to be able to actually do it," she said. "When you give them the Legos, they don't always learn that way. And so how do we make those connections? That's something that came out of a study just a couple of years ago.”
Whisman said the institute helps museums and library workers do their jobs and develop professionally.
Another Illinois library service funded is online research that resulted in more than a million citations last fiscal year, some in academic libraries, but the bulk in public libraries, according to the Illinois Library Association.
“That amounted to (263,379) 28% of searches; public libraries (65%) 610,099; K-12 school libraries (5%) 47,157 and special libraries such as medical, law, corporate, and government (2%) 17,254. Use of these services allows libraries to identify and access the resources that are required to meet the needs of users,” said the association.
A chunk of funding for public libraries goes to reducing the digital divide and helping at-risk students. American Library Association president Cindy Hohl warned of a major potential ramification.
“We may see Americans displaced and not being able to access information online,” said Hohl.
The institute funds online programs offering local access to nationally known speakers and authors.
Museum infrastructure
Museums also will have trouble funding building and exhibit improvements going forward. The institute does not fund museum operations but has funded exhibits and other long-lasting items. The institute’s Museums for America grant is the only federal competitive capital grant available for museums across the country. Whisman said those are typically in the $250,000 range.
“They're not funding the whole thing, but they're giving you a nice chunk to do some vital work for a design for actual construction that's off the table now.," she said "We had applied for an IMLS Museums for America grant back in November. We surely had a good shot at it, and now we can't even hope for it."
The McLean County Museum of History has benefited from that kind of grant. Director Julie Emig said $250,000 in federal money helped digitally preserve a Pantagraph Newspaper Negatives Collection.
“This grant provided public access to primary source material for scholarship, educational programming, publications, and exhibitions,” said Emig.
More recently the institute awarded the history museum $72,500 to improve the preservation and storage of its art collection that represents over 100 years of life in Central Illinois. Emig said the museum received that money just under the wire before President Trump issued his executive order.
“Projects like these are not possible without substantial grant funding. The loss of IMLS is devastating for museums, libraries, and the communities they serve across the country, including ours," said Emig.
Cultural erosion
The knock-on effect of the Republican Party pullback from culture, education, and the arts, library and museum officials said, could be significant to the American identity. Beth Whisman, of the Children's Discovery Museum, said when she read a congressional appropriations rule that explicitly bans funding for museums, it made her feel bad about what she does because it says more than just there are other priorities.
“They were saying, No, this isn't valuable! We don't want to spend money here. And I thought, wow! What does that mean for all of the benefits that museums bring to classrooms, to families, to lifelong learning, to access to resources?” said Whisman.
Whisman wondered when the quiet ways the institute affects libraries and museums go away, whether residents will be able to connect the dots.
“What's the culture of this community? What do we want our community to be? Do we want our community to be supported and learned and friendly and educated to some degree? And I think the exposure when it's lost, the threat is it could be missed, and that is a sad thought, because when you have a community that's not asking, hey, whatever happened to that program that they used to offer, or that service that we used to have?” said Whisman.
Added Fischer, “These services that are provided by all of our institutions, our public institutions that are supported by IMLS, these touch everyone. These touch seniors. They touch the disabled, these programs and these funds, they touch the unemployed, the underemployed, veterans, families, students. Everyone is touched by a public library.”
Can other entities pick up the balls the federal government is tossing away?
“No, I don't believe so, at least not quickly. Yeah, I don't think so,” said Fischer.
He and Whisman said private not-for-profit organizations may not have the same scope, and for-profit company research might focus on applied matters and be of less use to the public, libraries and museums.
Fischer said the institute funding of less than $300 million is three one thousandths of a percent of the federal budget.
“I think the poignant part for me is that look at what public libraries are doing with that, when you take a small number of resources and make such a valuable return on investment for your communities, I think that's what's profound,” said Fischer.
Whisman also said erosion of museum offerings will spin off to the visitor economy if they no longer draw in people with rich offerings.
Library and museum officials said in many ways — economically, culturally, and educationally — the end of the Institute of Museum and Library Services will change the face of America and make it a poorer place.
