I searched the transcript of the March 10, 2009 meeting hosted by the US Dept of Agriculture, Federal Communications Commission, and US Dept of Commerce regarding the rollout of broadband stimulus funding. Here is how “libraries” were mentioned both by speakers and by the audience:

Chairman Michael Copps, Acting Chair, Federal Communication Commission:

And we will endeavor to ignore no sector of our national life. Stop to think about it for a moment. What doesn’t broadband impact as we look to the future of America? Not just the basic ways we communicate with one another, but health care, information technology and the need to computerize medical records … Higher education and the needs of schools, libraries, and students as they gear up for the challenges of the 21st century … Each of these presents its own questions and new opportunities which need to be examined as part of a national broadband plan.

Rick Wade, Senior Advisor and Acting Chief of Staff of the Department of Commerce:

Fourth, we want to start taking steps toward ensuring that our schools, our universities, our libraries and community centers and job training centers and hospitals have high-speed access. We’ve been asked by Congress to focus on funding high-speed connections to these community anchor institutions.

Dr. Bernadette McGuire-Rivera, NTIA

The program purposes are to provide access in unserved areas, provide improved access in underserved areas, provide access for public safety agencies, and to stimulate broadband demand, economic growth and job creation consistent with the overall stimulus program, and to provide education awareness, training, access, equipment, and support, and in that they ask us to provide this to a very wide range of organizations—schools and libraries, medical and health care, higher ed, community organizations, organizations supporting vulnerable populations, and entities that will create jobs in designated areas.

Audience member (Mitsaco Herra, Montgomery County, MD):

For NTIA, are you planning on hiring additional staff or will you be outsourcing the actual review of the applications? What’s a reasonable number of grant applications, whether that’s 10,000, 5,000, 1,000 to expect to be able to give to and for the library program, are you looking for specifically those applications to come from individual libraries or from library jurisdictions?

MODERATOR: I’ll answer the second question first, then I’ll turn the first question over to Bernadette. We’re looking for the best that you have to offer, and so we’re not restricting in that sense. The statute lays out specific guidelines for who is eligible and who can apply and what you have to have in your application, but I think opening the door wide allows for the opportunity for us to review and see, and the cream will rise, I believe.

…

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And on the libraries?

MODERATOR: The libraries was my answer to your question, we’re opening the door wide, so whatever folks think is the best approach, it may be one library, it may be a group of libraries, it may be libraries, public safety, the local community. We leave that door wide open because we believe it will bring more innovative and forward-looking proposals for it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’m Alan, I’m with the American Library Association, and we represent America’s libraries through our 67,000 members. I have a comment and a question. The question is, can you say any more about the upcoming public meetings in terms of who gets to speak or who is invited to speak or whether there will be themes or anything of that sort? The comment is that we hope that grants or other federal assistance provided to service providers to build out the broadband infrastructure will give preference to those who build out infrastructure to make it accessible to libraries and other community organizations and will it include some type of preference such as discounts? Thank you.

MODERATOR: I think we’ve seen where American library association is going with their comments, and I think that that would be very helpful to have that information in, and again I’m sorry to repeat this over and over, but we need your help in figuring out those sorts of answers to those sorts of questions.

SEE ALSO: Broadband Stimulus Funding; Broadband Stimulus Funding, Part 2

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