St. Johnsbury Athenaeum distribution site for sanitizer, Census, and other materials. Michele: What approach have you taken with the CARES Act stimulus funds, including mechanisms you have used to distribute them? Jason: To find out what libraries were experiencing, we released a survey asking about their needs. We took a portion of the funds and purchased shield guards based on feedback from the survey. Vermont’s prison industry made them for us, which cost us less and allowed us to purchase additional items. We gave some funds to our historical society that oversees the State Museum of Vermont to do some virtual programming. We also provided a grant to our Green Mountain Library Consortium to make more eBooks accessible to a wider audience. Then we reserved some of the money in case the virus had a resurgence. We also planned on a second round of grants for Wi-Fi extenders to help around 50 libraries. The last round of funds was slated for disinfectant and cleaning wipes. We are just trying to make librarians’ lives as easy as possible, because they want their libraries to remain open and offer virtual services. In the first round, around 15 libraries needed a shield guard, but in the second round close to 120 libraries received them. This includes a lot of academic libraries and a few school libraries. Most items went to public libraries, but we did a little bit of everything for a variety of institutions. We stretched the money to have the largest impact and we are very happy to have been able to do so.