Budgets & Funding
On June 14, Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City Council reached an early agreement on the FY20 executive budget that included $33 million in additional funds for the city’s three library systems—Brooklyn Public Library, New York Public Library, and Queens Public Library—after they joined forces on a citywide advocacy campaign pushing back against more than $11 million in proposed cuts.
New York City's three public library systems—the New York Public Library, Queens Public Library, and Brooklyn Public Library—have received $33 million in additional expense funding in the city's FY20 budget.
In the wake of state funding cuts, the University of Iowa (UI) Libraries has identified more than 800 journal, database, and ebook subscriptions that it will cancel over the upcoming academic year. Library administration and liaisons worked with faculty to select subscriptions to be eliminated, targeting—and achieving—approximately $600,000 in savings. Faculty, staff, and students ultimately commended UI Libraries for its transparency and adherence to best practices throughout the process.
There is no such thing as a totally independent library board when the library’s funding stream is controlled by another entity. Libraries will never achieve consistently satisfactory funding levels as long as they are one of many agencies governed and/or solely funded by a larger political unit. When public libraries compete for funds with police, fire, sewers, schools, planning, and assessor’s offices, they lose. The tremendous cuts and closings weathered by public libraries in the UK over the past decade provide a cautionary tale.
A 50 percent cut to Ontario library services’ budget has already triggered the suspension of provincial government–sponsored interlibrary loan service in the south. Now the northern service has cut half of its unionized staff, which will mean a rollback in the support it provides to municipal libraries.
For the past decade, libraries have battled declining university budgets and increasing serials expenditures. With each Big Deal package renewal or cancellation, librarians and publishers have asked themselves: Did I make the best deal? Did I make the right deal? Recent developments in open access promise to bring major reform to academic publishing and, with that, new challenges and opportunities to the way that librarians and publishers choose to deal.
LJ ’s 2019 Budgets and Funding survey shows less lending but more programming, patron amenities, and outreach.
Since its inception in 1998, LJ’s annual materials survey has tracked budget and circulation statistics in public libraries nationwide. This year, owing to the increasing complexity of the materials libraries collect, we’ve moved the focus to circulation alone, leaving financial matters to the annual budget survey. It proved a particularly timely decision. In 2018, for the first time since 1999, circulation stumbled.
Voters spoke, and to a large extent, libraries continued to find support at the ballot box in 2018. After a striking level of wins in 2017, libraries on the ballot in 2018 have reset back to average historical pass/fail levels for a midterm election year—with a nonetheless healthy 79% passing overall.