On March 31, 2025, all Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) employees were placed on administrative leave, with access to their work systems blocked. The President replaced the agency’s leadership with the Deputy Secretary of Labor. Without leadership and staff, it’s expected that library funding will be halted.

This action puts crucial services at risk across the country—and especially here in Wisconsin. Federal law requires IMLS to provide support to public libraries, but that support is currently only guaranteed through September 2025.

Why IMLS Funding Matters to the Amery Area Public Library:

IMLS funds support BadgerLink, the state of Wisconsin's online library, currently available for free to all library users.

IMLS funds help support digital literacy efforts and access to free wifi and public computers to the Amery community, a real lifeline in rural communities where internet access is spotty.

IMLS funds help pay for staff to have required continuing education trainings. This allows us to spend more of our budget on materials and services.

IMLS funds support the ILL loan program, allowing patrons to access materials unavailable in the MORE catalog.

What can library users and supporters do to help?

Advocate for the services that matter to you! Please visit https://mywisconsinlibrary.org/ to learn more!

Digital Resources

NASA has an e-book collection available to the public for free.

Their website also contains multiple educational resources to explore.

International Children’s Digital Library houses an online library with over 4,000 children’s books from around the world in a multitude of languages. If you are looking for tales from around the world or if you are learning a new language this is a place to stop by.

Göteb Poet.org has a large selections of poems available to read, including poem-a-day. Check out their selection, fall in love with a few new poems and maybe sign up for their poem-a-day newsletter. April is National Poetry Month, so maybe you should start thinking of how to celebrate.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. Access old radio shows, early computer games, T.V. shows and over 23 million books.

Digital Public Library of America is a collection of digital copies of original materials from various university libraries around the US.

Library of Congress Digital Collections has multiple collections available online, consisting of over 2 million scans of historic books, photos and other materials. This includes a large selection of historic children’s books, Abraham Lincoln’s Papers and a collection of Folk songs from Michigan and Wisconsin.

Project Gutenberg is a library of over 60,000 free eBooks. Choose among free epub and Kindle eBooks, download them or read them online. You will find the world’s great literature here, with focus on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired.

University of Wisconsin-Madison Digital Collections contains millions of images, books, maps, recordings, documents, and more from across the UW, Wisconsin and the world. Enjoy learning more about our state’s past by browsing this collection.

HathiTrust is a partnership of academic & research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from libraries around the world. While many books on HathiTrust requires an institutional membership, reading online is free.

American Archive of Public Broadcasting allows viewing of historic programs of publicly funded radio and television across America.