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Gigabit Libraries and Beyond

The Gigabit Libraries and Beyond project ran through 2023 and was made possible through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) RE-246219-OLS-20. The grant improved and expanded the successful Toward Gigabit Libraries toolkit to help libraries improve their communities by identifying trends to make informed decisions on broadband improvement, technology purchases, and IT planning.

The project team’s accomplishments include the following:

The new toolkit is over 100 pages- more than double the size of the original toolkit. Importantly, the expanded toolkit addresses two critically important issues involving libraries and digital equity, with new sections on 1) funding, and 2) community support and advocacy. We tripled the number of diagrams and visual aids, and added over 100 updated links to the toolkit.

Our team made significant progress working with tribal organizations and leaders to conduct several pilot site visits. Highlights from our outreach include presenting at the ATALM 2022 Conference, where we connected with several different Native Libraries for toolkit visits and the FCC to present to their tribal library pilot cohort. We connected with ATLAM Digital Inclusion Lab cohort, which allowed us to nearly double our site visits in the last year of the grant. We continue to make inroads with Native Libraries, and look forward to the opportunities ahead.

We also successfully conducted a week of outreach and site visits in Hawaii. Stacey Aldrich, Hawaii’s State Librarian and GLB Advisory Board Member, opened doors and set the stage for our visit. Our major activities included meeting with the State Library IT team, Burt Lum and the Hawaii Broadband Office, the statewide broadband weekly meetup Broadband Hui, the University of Hawaii-Honolulu, the University of Hawaii- Hilo, Native Hawaiian Library ALU LIKE in Oߵahu, and several Native Hawaiian Churches.