ALA Washington Office wants your input on library advocacy

The American Library Association Washington Office (ALA-WO) would like to find out what you need to be a better advocate. What topics are important to you? What resources or assistance do you need to deliver effective advocacy messages? What are the barriers to advocating? ALA-WO wants to know! They are working with Stephanie Vance, the Advocacy Guru, to find out what would how best to help you with your advocacy efforts.

To help ALA-WO, please take the survey. The survey should take about 10 minutes to complete. The deadline for responses is September 15, 2013.

Thanks in advance for your input!

Senate Committee recommends increase in LSTA funding

The Senate Appropriations Committee is recommending an increase to $157,266,000 for the Library Services & Technology Act (LSTA) Grants to States program and an increase to $13,200,000 for National Leadership Grants.  This is more than a $7 million increase over the President’s request for FY 2014. To make this a reality, this increase must be passed by the Senate and prevail in the House-Senate conference for FY2014 appropriations.

Please take a moment to contact Senator Mikulski, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, and thank her for the proposed increase in LSTA funds and her support of libraries. It only takes a few minutes and you can easily do this using Capwiz. Thanks in advance!

Senate to hold E-rate hearing

On July 17th, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold a hearing on E-rate. According to the District Dispatch, the hearing is on “…strengthening the E-rate program and expanding access to the latest digital technology and learning tools in our libraries and schools.” The hearing is scheduled to coincide with the Open Meeting of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) being held on July 19th. At this meeting, the Commissioners will consider an E-rate Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) that would modernize the E-rate program to support high-speed broadband. Maine State Librarian Linda Lord, who also serves as the Chair of the ALA E-Rate Task Force, will speak on behalf of libraries.

If interested, here’s how you can learn more:

• Listen to the hearing – On Wednesday, July 17th at 2:30pm, the hearing, E-Rate 2.0: Connecting Every Child to the Transformative Power of Technology, will be broadcast live via webcast. Refresh the webpage at 2:20pm to begin automatically streaming the webcast. The webcast will also be archived.
• Listen to the Open Meeting – On Friday, July 19th at 10:30am, listen to the live webcast of the Open Commission Meeting during which E-rate will be discussed. The archived webcast will also be available at the same site.
• Share your E-rate and library broadband success stories – The ALA Office for Information Technology Policy is interested in hearing your success stories. Email Marijke Visser and/or Larra Clark at mvisser@alawash.org and lclark@alawash.org.
• Read up on E-rate – For more information, including some background on the E-rate program and current efforts for improvement, see the District Dispatch post.