The I.M.L.S., while little known to the public, has a larger budget than both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities. It was created in 1996, and has been reauthorized several times, most recently in 2018, in bipartisan legislation signed by Mr. Trump.
The agency, which has roughly 70 employees, provides funding to libraries and museums in every state and territory, often to support essential but unglamorous back-office activities like cataloging and database management, which often struggle to attract private philanthropic support.
Its largest program, known as Grants to States, delivers roughly $160 million annually to state library agencies, which covers one third to one half of their budgets, according the Chief Officers of State Library Associations, an independent group representing library officials. The agency also provides competitive grants directly to institutions of all sizes and types.
Recent grants have included $250,000 to the Seattle Public Library to support teen mental health; $150,000 to the University of South Florida to develop library resources for autistic patrons; and $246,000 to the New York Public Library to develop curriculum materials based on the collections at its Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The agency also supports small, lesser-known institutions, like the Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire, which recently received a three-year, $213,000 grant to inventory the more than 40,000 items in its collection, including a cache of early-19th-century letters recently discovered hidden under an attic roof.
“We have I.M.L.S. to thank for giving us the means to hire curators and the dedicated time to discover, through inventory, new aspects of Shaker life that we can share with the public,” Shirley Wajda, the curator of collections, said in an email.
