Introduction

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) welcomes you to its State Library Agencies (StLA) Survey site. The StLA Survey is the product of a cooperative effort between the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA), the U.S. National Commission on Libraries and Information Science (NCLIS), the U.S. Census Bureau (the data collection agent), and NCES. The survey is conducted annually, and participation is voluntary.

NCES is authorized to collect these data under the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002. NCES is the primary federal entity for collecting, analyzing, and reporting data related to education in the United States and other nations. It fulfills a congressional mandate to collect, collate, analyze, and report full and complete statistics on the condition of education in the United States; conduct and publish reports and specialized analyses of the meaning and significance of such statistics; assist state and local education agencies in improving their statistical systems; and review and report on education activities in foreign countries.

Purpose of the Survey

The StLA Survey provides state and federal policymakers, researchers, and other interested users with descriptive information about StLAs. The survey collects some data on public, academic, and school libraries; these data, when added to the data collected through the NCES surveys of public, academic, and school libraries, help complete the national picture of library service.

Uses of the Data

The data are useful to (1) Chief Officers of state library agencies; (2) policymakers in the executive and legislative branches of federal and state governments; (3) government and library administrators at federal, state, and local levels; (4) the American Library Association and its members or customers; (5) library and public policy researchers; and (6) the public, journalists, and others.

Institutional Burden

According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995, no person should be asked to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. The valid OMB control number for this information collection is 1850-0705. The time required to complete this information collection is estimated to average 21 hours per response, including the time to review instructions, search existing data resources, gather the data needed, and complete and review the information collection. If you have any comments concerning the accuracy of the time estimate or suggestions for improving this form, please write to: U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C. 20202-4651. If you have comments or concerns regarding the status of your individual submission of this form, write directly to govs.stla@census.gov.

NCES Privacy Policy and Use of Cookies by the StLA Survey

This notice is to assure respondents that NCES does not use cookies to collect personal information. This system was developed using Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP). This technology (and competing technologies) requires the web server to remember users as they move from page to page during their data entry session. The web server accomplishes this task by assigning a unique “session ID” to a user when they log on. In order to support multiple users accessing the system at the same time, the web server uses a “cookie” to track the session ID. The web server sends a cookie to the user’s browser when a new session is created. This cookie contains the session ID and no personal data about the user. No information besides the session ID is written to the user’s hard drive. The cookie is deleted when the user closes the browser. The most recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator allow for rejecting all cookies other than those required for session tracking.

NOTE: Session ID cookies are required to run this application.

The complete NCES Privacy Policy is available on the NCES website at http://nces.ed.gov/help/privacy.asp.