If you have visited the Workforce Information Council Library in the past, you most likely recall the older version, which was frozen around 2021 and had more file cabinets than front doors. This reconstruction modifies the experience while preserving the content. What’s actually inside hasn’t changed; it’s a working record of how state labor market information offices have collaborated, sometimes for over 20 years, to make labor data useful to researchers, workforce boards, and governor’s offices.
The Workforce Investment Act established the Workforce Information Council, or WIC as most people simply refer to it, to coordinate how states gather, evaluate, and disseminate labor market data—the kind of information that reveals where jobs are expanding, where they are disappearing, and what skills employers are actually hiring for. It’s not a glamorous job. Seldom do state LMI directors make headlines. However, almost every state in the nation measures its own labor market according to the standards and procedures established in WIC meetings, frequently without anyone outside the industry realizing it.
This library is filled with that history. A tiny time capsule appears when you look through the older holdings: a 2012 paper on “LMI Customers and Their Needs,” a 2009 “Level of Demand” report, and meeting minutes that very few state agencies ever thoroughly review. It reads more like the working files of an organization that genuinely cared about accurate labor statistics, even when no one outside the field was looking, than it does like a polished policy archive.
The 2008 digest Workforce Information—Making a Difference, which was created after the U.S. Department of Labor requested states to provide actual instances of how labor market data had influenced actual policy decisions, is one document worth consulting. Over fifty examples were provided by the fourteen states that responded. Even now, there is value in that exercise: a federal request that merely inquired as to whether the data was relevant to anyone and received a genuine response.
Additionally, the council made investments in the workers. Ahead of the annual conference of the National Association of State Workforce Agencies in October 2008, fifteen newly appointed LMI directors convened in Indianapolis; over half of them had less than two years of experience. “Dealing with Media and Management” and a concluding panel with the straightforward title “Issues, Challenges, and the Future of LMI” were on the agenda. It’s the kind of training that doesn’t make news, but it’s precisely the foundation that keeps fifty different state systems in sync.
A large portion of that content now coexists with more recent materials on WorkforceGPS, the community library sponsored by the Department of Labor, where the council’s Skills Initiative Summary Report is located alongside ongoing research on industry competency models and apprenticeships. It serves as a helpful point of comparison. Similar long-term, practitioner-driven libraries have been established by other workforce-adjacent initiatives, such as CILIP’s five-year strategy for the UK’s information workforce or the Public Library Association initiative of the American Library Association, which links job seekers to library resources. WIC’s contribution has always been a little more subdued, focused more on ensuring the underlying numbers hold up than on public outreach.
Rebuilding this library instead of starting from scratch really serves that purpose. The information gathered here, which dates back to the council’s founding, continues to serve as the foundation for the creation and utilization of labor market data nationwide. The answers are usually found here, whether you’re a researcher trying to understand how a policy decision was made, a new LMI director searching for orientation materials, or just someone wondering how all fifty states came to measure unemployment in the same way. It’s worth looking more closely.
