The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is an independent grant making agency and the primary source of federal support for the nation’s approximately 120,000 libraries and 35,000 museums and related organizations. IMLS helps ensure that all Americans have access to museum, library, and information services. The agency supports innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic engagement, enabling museums and libraries from geographically and economically diverse areas to deliver essential services that make it possible for individuals and communities to thrive. The agency’s mission is to inspire libraries and museums to advance innovation, learning, and civic engagement and to provide leadership through research, policy development, and grant making.Those goals are reflected in this year’s report as IMLS continues to be an outstanding steward of federal funds. IMLS will continue to look for ways to achieve even greater impact on library and museum services throughout the United States.

The widespread deployment of repository systems in higher education and research institutions provides the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication. However, repository platforms are still using technologies and protocols designed almost twenty years ago, before the boom of the Web and the dominance of Google, social networking, semantic web and ubiquitous mobile devices.In April 2016, COAR launched the Next Generation Repositories Working Group to identify the core functionalities for the next generation of repositories, as well as the architectures and technologies required to implement them. This report presents the results of work by this group over the last 1.5 years. The Next Generation Repositories Working Group has explicitly focused on the generic technologies required by all repositories to support the adoption of common behaviors. This report describes 11 new behaviors, as well as the technologies, standards and protocols that will facilitate the development of new services on top of the collective network, including social networking, peer review, notifications, and usage assessment. 1. Exposing Identifiers 2. Declaring Licenses at a Resource Level 3. Discovery through Navigation 4. Interacting with Resources (Annotation, Commentary and Review) 5. Resource Transfer 6. Batch Discovery 7. Collecting and Exposing Activities 8. Identification …

Series of fictional stories and commentaries about sports in the United States and how they affect individuals and communities.