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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.
LJ ’s 2019 Budgets and Funding survey shows less lending but more programming, patron amenities, and outreach.
Grant-writing can be intimidating to librarians who can’t afford dedicated staff for the task. But help and opportunity are out there.
On December 19, the House of Representatives passed the Museum and Library Services Act (MLSA) by a margin of 331–28, and it was signed into law on December 31. The bill, also known as S. 3530, reauthorizes the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) through 2025.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York awarded CRL $200,000 in funding to lead a one-year effort to plan the next phase of the World Digital Library.
Oregon’s Douglas County libraries made news in spring 2017, after a measure on the November 2016 ballot failed and the 11-branch system closed its libraries. Since then, a small but loyal number of volunteers and Friends organizations have stepped in to bring their libraries back as DIY operations, one at a time.
Voters turned out at the polls in record numbers on Tuesday, November 6, for the 2018 midterm elections. But strong voter turnout did not necessarily drive support for libraries at the voting booth.
The 11th annual Index spotlights the best of the best of America's public libraries on five key measures of service.
For the last two data cycles, we have hoped to be able to add Wi-Fi sessions to the five existing per capita statistics: circulation, e-circulation, library visits, program attendance, and public Internet computer uses.
A variety of solutions for counting Wi-Fi sessions in public libraries are available; some for free, and many at modest cost.
Linda Hofschire, PhD, director of the Library Research Service at the Colorado State Library, and a 2017 LJ Mover & Shaker, is chair of the newly created Measurement, Evaluation, and Assessment Committee of the Public Library Association.
On September 5 the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded a $50,000 grant to the New Mexico State Library (NMSL) for “Libraries Lead: A Creative Economy Initiative.” The funding will advance “Libraries as Launchpads,” a multi-partner program designed to enable small, rural, and tribal libraries across the state to serve as economic development centers and help entrepreneurs bring their business ideas to fruition.
PREMIUM
The End of Fines?
As more and more libraries are finding, eliminating fees lowers barriers while still bringing books back into circulation.
Thanks to a $12 million gift, the New York Public Library (NYPL) has begun work on a permanent exhibition of treasures from its extensive—and eclectic—collections.
The Institute of Museum and Library Services issued its most recent Public Libraries Survey (PLS) Report on August 2, offering a look at public library use, financial health, staffing, and resources in the country’s 9,068 active public libraries in FY 2015.
Legislation to be put forward in January, 2019 proposes a $50 million permanent state fund to provide some $50,000 per year for more than 40 rural community libraries across New Mexico.
A newly released American Library Association (ALA) report marks the 10th anniversary of the American Dream Literacy Initiative and celebrates the many ways that participating public libraries have transformed lives.
The State Library of Ohio has launched Libraries by the Numbers (LBTN), a web-based data visualization tool that enables users to create custom infographics about individual library systems using data drawn from their Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Public Library Surveys.
Council revisited its ongoing plan to reorganize for effectiveness and efficiency, adopted several important resolutions, and more at the 2018 Annual ALA Conference,
LibraryLinkNJ, a statewide cooperative that oversees a $1.36 million interlibrary loan (ILL) delivery service serving 2,600 public, private, academic, corporate, and other libraries throughout the New Jersey, will stay in business at least one more year after members voted to approve a $2.38 million budget for its fiscal year 2019.
As Canada’s Saskatoon Public Library, Saskatchewan, nears the launch of its new organization-wide restructuring, employees are both excited and apprehensive about their new roles, library leadership is optimistic about the shift to a community-led model, and negotiations with the library workers’ union are still in progress.
Flat budgets, price increases, and a reliance on status journals for tenure and promotion keep familiar pressures on the serials marketplace.
Jeanne Marie Ryan has some advice for anyone who wants to get anything big done: “It pays to be persistent—and keep smiling as you go back to people.” That approach served her well as the chief strategist for and coordinator of the New Jersey Library Construction Bond Act. “She’s the Godmother of our first-ever library bond act,” says nominator Chris Carbone, director of the South Brunswick Public Library, NJ.
More than one-third (37%) of academic library materials budgets go to database subscriptions and electronic reference materials, followed by journals and serials (23%), print books (22%), ebooks (11%), and media/streaming media (5%), according to the Academic Library Collection Development Survey 2017, conducted by LJ’s research department and sponsored by EBSCO. Book holdings are still weighted toward print, with survey respondents, on average, describing print as 60.3 percent of their overall collection, and ebooks as 39.7 percent.
Library Legislative Day in Kentucky on February 15 will give directors and advocates their first real chance to push back against Gov. Matt Bevin’s recent FY18–20 budget proposal, which seeks to eliminate every penny of the $2.5 million currently earmarked for direct state aid to libraries.
What’s hot, what’s not, and how much does it cost? That’s what LJ first asked two decades ago when it launched its annual book-buying survey of U.S. public libraries. With today’s media mostly on the horizon, the survey initially dwelled on print, and library purchasing power was the main thrust. Now the survey takes in ever-shifting funding and borrowing data for an ever-growing range of materials, with a greater focus on what circulates.
State Library Administrative Agencies (SLAA) across the country experienced major decreases in revenue and staffing during the economic recession, according to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) biennial State Library Administrative Agencies (SLAA) Survey, conducted in FY16.
Roy and Mary Garrett, residents of Escondido, CA, and longtime library patrons, are suing the city over its decision to privatize the Escondido Public Library (EPL). Officials voted in August to turn library operations over to Library Systems and Services (LS&S), a private for-profit company that manages public libraries, to forestall a projected citywide pension shortfall. In October, the city council voted to enter into a ten-year contract with the firm. Many residents have opposed the move from the beginning, noting that city officials pursued the plan without asking for input or presenting alternatives.
Combining marketing savvy and hometown ties, Medina County’s Tina Sabol turned a library levy campaign into a communitywide advocacy win/
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, has awarded 12 organizations Community Catalyst Grants totaling $1,637,271. Libraries are project partners of eight of the 12.
LYRASIS last month named the first recipients of its $100,000 LYRASIS Leadership Circle’s Catalyst Fund, which was created to support new ideas and projects by LYRASIS members.
Starting the first week of July 2017, the Nashville Public Library (NPL) and the Salt Lake City Public Library system (SLCPL) have joined the increasing number of public libraries in the United States that no longer collect overdue fines from patrons. These changes will also wipe out fines that users have already accrued. For both systems, this shift reflects their missions to remove a barrier to library borrowing—blocked card privileges due to fines and to provide equitable access to as many patrons as possible.
The first staff layoffs since 2011 is this confirmed will take effect in July at the Montana State Library (MSL) in Helena, as one of several cost-cutting measures forced by budget cuts enacted by the legislature for FY18 and 19. And MSL officials are bracing for a second, even steeper round of reductions in funding, staff, and services later this summer.
As Maker spaces in libraries become increasingly common, often backed by grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)—and Maker activities without a dedicated space even more so—anyone who follows the professional literature and conference presentations is surely aware of the buzz around Making. But just how much does that buzz represent widespread practice, and of what precisely do these offerings consist?
The shift to digital delivery of serials content has had a profound effect on the information ecosystem. Powerful discovery and social networking tools expose users to an incredibly rich world of commercially produced and open access (OA) content. Most publishers have explored new ways of pricing their content—such as population served, FTE (full-time equivalent), tiered pricing based upon Carnegie classification, or other defining criteria—or the database model, which treats all content within an e-journal package as a database, eliminating the need for title by title reconciliation. However, in the end, the pricing conversation always seems to circle back to the revenue generated by the annual subscription model.
At EveryLibrary and LJ, we tracked 184 library elections in 2016. Nationwide, over 3.7 million voters cast a ballot in what turned out to be the most contentious election cycle of a generation. Libraries won and lost in blue cities and red counties alike.
Faculty and students returning to the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Boston campus for the Spring 2017 semester will encounter a library with resources noticeably reduced thanks to dramatic budget cuts. On November 10, 2016, an email notified the UMass Boston community of budget cuts for Fiscal Year 2017, including roughly 20 percent of the Healey Library’s general operating fund, amounting to approximately $700,000.
The Navajo Nation Library (NNL) is working to secure the funding necessary to digitize and catalog thousands of hours of stories, songs, and oral histories of the Navajo people, originally recorded in the 1960s by the Navajo Culture Center of the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity (ONEO).
Few libraries were untouched by the economic downturn of the 2000s. As systems began to rebound, however, a challenge was to replace the perception that they were down and out with the new reality of extended hours, replenished staff, and improved services. The strongest marketers among them also focused on the stories behind those comebacks, and information about what users could expect going forward. The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library (CML), in the city of Charlotte and County of Mecklenburg, NC, was determined not just to recover but to come back stronger than ever, to make sure its customers knew it—and to give them a chance to tell their side of the story.
At her core, LJ Mover & Shaker Ludmila (Mila) Pollock is an archivist. As the executive director, library and archives at the Genentech Center for the History of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she has been at the forefront of preserving the annals of scientific breakthroughs—through the stories of the people who made them.
When classes began on the Brooklyn, NY campus of Long Island University (LIU) September 7, students found their professors barred from campus and replaced by alternate instructors. A contract stalemate between LIU-Brooklyn faculty and management had resulted in an unprecedented lockout of 400 faculty members by administration days before the new semester began. Thanks to coordinated protests from faculty and students and the support of the LIU Faculty Federation (LIUFF), however, the 12-day lockout ended after a six-hour negotiating session on September 14.
In this webcast, our experts will highlight how librarians are tackling this important issue, and how the library can shape the future of funding Open Access.
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What does fracking have to do with scholarly publishing and journal pricing? While the library financial landscape has improved since the depth of the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, it still cannot be considered robust. As articles such as this one chronicle annual serials price increases, libraries, publishers, and vendors search for innovative ways to fulfill information needs within the finite, predefined budget environment. New business and access models ranging from the initial e-journal big deal packages, article pay per view, open access, mega-journals, and publisher e-journal database pricing have evolved in response to the environment; libraries, publishers, and vendors have merged, consolidated, or disappeared along the way. Just as fracking keeps the oil and gas flowing, these strategies enable the current scholarly publishing ecosystem to extract the necessary resources—intellectual and financial—to survive.
On March 15, the Plainfield Public Library District (PPLD), IL, failed to pass two referenda—a bond measure and a property tax increase—needed to raise money for a new library building. The ticket fell victim to a Vote No campaign consisting of mailers and last-minute robocalls funded by Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a right-wing super PAC (political action committee) with an antitax agenda. Behind AFP lies tens of thousands of dollars from the billionaire Koch brothers, lifelong Libertarians who heavily oppose taxes, social services, and industrial oversight, among other government functions.
The financial shift from subscribers to authors will have long term and potentially positive effects on peer-reviewed scientific and medical reporting.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has issued a $1.2 million grant to remake the Harold F. Johnson Library at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, as a Knowledge Commons—an integrated, centralized hub of content, tools, and academic support services. While the library’s transformation over the next four years looks to a brand new service model, it also continues the tradition of innovation on which the library was established some 50 years ago.
As the University of Connecticut (UConn) library system braces for a $1.2 million budget cut in 2016, a reduction that will mean the loss of 7.5 FTEs among other disruptions in service, a group of concerned faculty members say they are heartened by the administration’s apparent openness toward exploring new ways of plugging a revenue gap that shows little sign of abating.
In 2015, nearly 150 libraries in 24 states held referenda to renew or enact taxes for operations, staffing, or facilities. More than 1.1 million voters showed up at the polls in 2015 to decide on tax measures for their libraries. Just over 650,000 people voted yes and nearly 470,000 voted no. Of the 148 library ballot measures we have identified (through news reports, surveys, and direct involvement of EveryLibrary, the national library PAC the authors work for), 127 were won and 21 lost. One, while technically passing, actually rolled back the library’s funding, making it, in our opinion, a loss.
LJ’s 2016 survey of U.S. public libraries, distributed geographically by size and type, reveals that while libraries continue to regain lost ground, recovery is gradually slowing—and not evenly distributed. Libraries reported moderate gains in overall budgets—an across-the-board increase of 3.2%, representing funding from all sources. Combined with a slight drop in inflation rates—.5% over the 12 months ending in November, compared to .8% for the preceding year—this is still smaller than last year’s overall uptick of 4.3% but welcome nonetheless.
Layoffs at colleges and universities, once a fairly rare occurrence, are now becoming more commonplace. If you’ve yet to come across a story in your local news about an institution announcing layoffs and cuts, you probably will soon.
On the face of it, 2014 looks like it was a pretty good year for libraries at the ballot box: some 148 libraries reporting for this tally won and 42 lost. About 78% of libraries passed funding, bonds, or authority measures in 2014.
Within 24 hours of being dismissed by the recently reconstituted Queens Library (QL) Board of Trustees on the evening of December 17, former QL President and CEO Thomas Galante announced via his lawyer Hillary Prudlo that he would sue for wrongful termination. The reorganized board had placed Galante on indefinite, paid administrative leave on September 11, citing an ongoing audit of QL's finances by New York City comptroller Scott Stringer, and investigations by the city Department of Investigation (DOI) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regarding construction contracts awarded by the library.
In a case that has drawn comparisons to the RoweCom/Faxon Library Services bankruptcy almost 12 years ago, the court of Amsterdam on Friday, September 19 granted Netherlands-based Swets & Zeitlinger Group permission to suspend payments to its creditors, and on Tuesday, September 23 accepted a bankruptcy filing from the group’s subsidiary—global subscription management provider Swets Information Services
Thomas W. Galante, the embattled president and CEO of the Queens Library in New York, on the evening of September 11 was placed on indefinite, paid administrative leave by the library’s recently reorganized board, following months of negative local news coverage regarding his $392,000 salary, his consulting work, library renovation projects that included his office, and an FBI investigation regarding QL’s procedures for awarding construction contracts.
As part of an overhaul of its budgets and strategic priorities, the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon plans to trim its campus library system from seven branches to three, resulting in much of its collection being moved to offsite storage. Library officials spoke of the plan as in line with their vision for the future of the campus libraries. But some faculty members have publicly questioned the moves, leading one dean to be fired in the wake of a letter he penned criticizing the university’s plans.
As we approach this year’s BookExpo America (BEA), it’s useful, perhaps especially to publishers, to contemplate where libraries fit into the broad book market. It’s hard to ignore just how fundamentally important libraries have become to the potential success of a book—that is, if you pay attention to a few simple facts and are willing to question persistent myths.
On March 12, academic research nonprofit Ithaka S+R released its latest survey of academic library leaders. Gathering input from 499 library deans and directors from institutions large and small, the new Library Survey—the first of its kind since 2010—paints a picture of the shifting priorities of modern academic libraries, the challenges they face, and the resources and leadership techniques they’re using to meet those challenges.
Controversy over reading selections at a pair of colleges in South Carolina last year has reared its head again, and this time it may result in budget cuts for the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina Upstate. The budget committee in the state House of Representatives recommended budget cuts totaling $70,000 for the two schools, which assigned incoming students and others to read literature about LGBT issues last year.
In recent years, the Chester Fritz Library at the University of North Dakota (UND) has been in a funding situation that may sound familiar to many academic librarians. While the budget for the library has been flat since 2008, annual largess from the university’s discretionary funds has kept the library from having to eliminate services. This year, though, those supplemental funds are not available, meaning that even without a cut, the library faces a gaping hole in its funding.
The water surrounding Queens Public Library (QPL) President and CEO Thomas W. Galante just keeps getting hotter. In the weeks since the New York Daily News published a story detailing his $392,000 annual salary and the pricey renovations done to his office while QPL branches were suffering staff cuts, Galante has consistently denied any wrongdoing, even while other city officials call on him to step down from the post he has held since 2005.
Late last month, the announcement that libraries at the University of North Texas (UNT) in Denton would have to cut $1.7 million from the materials budget sent staff and students around the campus into an uproar, with students and faculty flocking to defend a library system that they see as key to their success as scholars. While UNT Provost Warren Burrgren has walked those statements back in recent days and laid immediate concerns about budget cuts to rest, the controversy started a conversation on the campus about how the library should be funded that isn’t dying down, even as cuts to the library budget are halted or postponed.
Four months after Detroit filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, retired Detroit Public Library (DPL) employees are still struggling with anxiety over the fate of their retirement benefits, which are all-but certain to be targeted for significant cuts as part of a wide-ranging strategy to return the troubled city to solvency.
Can your library afford new branches or even operate existing facilities? Many libraries still struggle to meet increasing demand with flat or falling budgets and outmoded facilities.
As a result of the federal government shutdown, many resources that researchers, academics, and library patrons depend on—like the Library of Congress (LC) archives—have been rendered unavailable in the last week. The bad news is that, eight days in and with no clear end to this stalemate in sight, there’s no telling how long those resources might be on lock down. The good news is that a variety of other institutions are stepping up to fill in the gap and make sure a government shutdown doesn’t turn into an information shutdown.
As states across the nation tighten their belts, library budgets have landed on the chopping block more frequently in the past few years. This year, The Institute for Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) received eight requests for Maintenance of Effort (MOE) waivers that would let states continue to receive previously approved matching grants through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) even though the funds they’re intended to match will not be provided. That’s more than the IMLS has received in any year since the financial downturn of 2008. Of the eight applicants, only three—Hawaii, Oklahoma, and South Carolina—were awarded waivers. The remaining five states—Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Texas—stand to lose federal funding as state legislatures fail to live up to their end of the LSTA grant agreements, which are meant to supplement state spending on library programs, rather than supplant it.
After late night wrangling failed to produce a short term spending bill that could pass both the Senate and House of Representatives, the U.S. federal government has shut down for the first time in nearly two decades. As of this morning, federal agencies that support the mission of libraries around the country -- from the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences to the Library of Congress have found themselves forced to close their doors and furlough the majority of their staffers.
A northern Kentucky library district won at least a temporary reprieve from wholesale budget cuts last week, after a judge ruled that its tax rate can stay the same until an ongoing lawsuit—which is being watched closely by libraries across the state—winds its way through the appeals process.
Community outrage over having weeded a quarter of a million books into dumpsters isn’t the kind of public relations brouhaha that any library relishes dealing with. That scandal, though, may be the least of the problems for the Fairfax County Public Library, VA, (FCPL) where the library’s Board of Trustees has pressed pause on implementing a strategic plan that was supposed to help guide the library forward.
Students and faculty of North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, are now diving into the first full school year with a new library at their disposal on the school’s Centennial Campus, and the rest of us get to watch as a new model hits its stride. The Hunt Library, which opened its doors in January after much anticipation and had the spring to work out any kinks, articulates the vision of the team at NCSU’s libraries. That team is led by Susan Nutter, vice provost and director of NCSU’s libraries and LJ’s 2005 Librarian of the Year. (We have a saying at LJ, “once a Librarian of the Year, always a Librarian of the Year,” and she keeps living up to it.)
An eight-hour marathon budget meeting on Tuesday, September 10, ended when Miami-Dade County Commissioners broke open the piggy bank, emptying a $7.8 million library reserve fund to avoid cuts in library service that would have slashed operating hours at many branches and eliminated hundreds of staff jobs. (Those plans themselves represented an improvement over earlier scenarios which would have closed as many as 42 of the system’s 49 branches.)
With belts tightening in departments across campus, the University of South Florida library faced cuts to its hours, which had been 24 hours a day, five days a week. Administrators, though, seemingly underestimated how much USF students counted on the library to play host to all night study sessions. When the reduced hours went into effect on August 26, USF students returned to school to find a library that opened at 7:30 a.m. weekday mornings, only to shutter its doors at midnight. In response, hundreds of students protested the decision with “sit-outs” and letter writing campaigns. Those protests paid off last week, when administration and library officials announced the return of the library’s popular ‘up-all-night’ schedule.
Cengage Learning reached an agreement with an ad hoc committee of first lien lenders to reduce approximately $4 billion of the company’s $5.8 billion of outstanding debt, the company announced yesterday. In conjunction with the deal, and as the company announced it might in May, Cengage and its domestic, wholly owned subsidiaries filed voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 in the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York. (Cengage’s non-U.S. subsidiaries are not included in the filings and “will continue to operate in the ordinary course without interruption,” the company said in a statement.)
Oklahoma’s Tulsa City-County Library (TCCL) cut $1 million from its operating budget in anticipation of lost revenue from the state, which recently made changes to its tax code. For the fiscal year which began July 1, the budget is now $26.4 million. That includes $607,000 in materials cuts, and $327,000 in personnel cuts. (The latter will come from retirement and attrition, not layoffs).
Six branches would be closed, 33 FTEs eliminated, and Sunday hours eliminated system-wide in a worst-case budget scenario approved by the Jacksonville Public Library, FL’s board of trustees, who now have no option except to wait and see whether a lengthy city budget process takes a favorable turn. The Jacksonville Public Library is by no means alone in its plight. Branch closures and staff cuts are on the table at library districts around the nation as the summer budget process unfolds. Omaha, NE; Flint, ME; Falls City, OR; and the huge Fulton County, GA, system all have funding issues to resolve.
The Enoch Pratt Free Library (EPFL), Baltimore, MD, has plenty of books, but not enough bookkeepers. For the second year in a row, an audit of the EPFL’s finances has unearthed “significant” internal bookkeeping problems, the most serious of which delayed a scheduled $3.2 million payment to the City of Baltimore for almost a year.
The stock market has hit record highs, and unemployment has reached the lowest level since the recession began. Despite this good news, the library economic environment has not seen commensurate improvement. There continues to be a struggle to find the resources needed to support library collections and services, and conditions remain highly unsettled.
BPL, one of three systems in New York City and the country’s fifth-largest library (by population served), has suffered consistent underfunding of capital needs, with its 59 locations facing a $230 million backlog of deferred maintenance, barely dented by the $15 million annual allotment of capital funding. Their solution: sell two aging libraries that occupy valuable land, and work with real estate developers to include libraries in residential towers. It’s not uncommon for urban libraries to consider mixed-use buildings, though few face the real estate froth characteristic in Brooklyn.
The Free Library of Philadelphia plans to merge with The Rosenbach Museum & Library, which houses a rare book, fine art, and archival materials collection built around the personal library of noted dealers Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach and his brother Philip. The institutions signed a letter of intent following board approval by each of the organizations on April 16, nearly a year after the Rosenbach first approached the Free Library with the idea.
Courtroom setbacks handed out to two Northern Kentucky library districts within 10 days of each other have placed their ability to collect tax revenue in jeopardy. The litigation stems from six members of the Northern Kentucky Tea Party who launched a legal assault against these libraries’ ability to collect tax money without voter approval. If pursued, the tax implications of these cases could imperil district funding for libraries across the state.
Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, everyone from indie bands to technology developers to non-profit organizations has asked themselves, “Will crowdfunding work for me?” Libraries, which often turn to more civic-minded crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Fundly, are no exception. But the question remains: does it work?
It’s been a surprising and energizing spring for the Washington, DC, library community as Mayor Vincent Gray publicly endorsed two of its top wish-list items during his March 27 budget introduction: a proposed $103 million overhaul of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the city’s landmark central branch, and a 25 percent bump in total system funding earmarked for keeping every facility open seven days a week.
Regardless of what The West Wing may have told us, elections are always a numbers game. Let’s say your public library serves a community of 10,000 people and you are fielding a $15 million bond measure to build a new library next November. If we run the “national average” numbers for a Congressional election cycle, you will likely have around 7,000 people of voting age in your jurisdiction. Voter registration runs as high as 60 percent for these biennial elections. However, turn out will be as low as 42 percent in a general election. If your bond measure looses by 4 percent, a not unheard of margin, you will have lost by 141 votes. If you are on the primary ballot—where turn out is in the 22 percent range—you lose by just 74 votes. Multiply that by five or by ten for bigger towns and cities and counties and we’re still talking about small numbers of voters.
Writer Stephen King is known for many things: suspenseful storytelling, horror tales, and literary rock band music. But another long-time role is now capturing worldwide attention: library philanthropist. The Bangor Public Library announced last week that Stephen and his wife and fellow author Tabitha King will donate $3 million toward the library’s $9 million renovation, redesign, and capital campaign, as long as the library can find other funds to reach the rest of its goal.
According to the Sunlight Foundation, on March 20 the House Oversight and Government Reform committee green-lighted a bill that would make public presidential library donation records. The bill would require disclosure of all donations over $200, whereas currently no donations are required to be disclosed.
Everywhere you turn in the world of libraries these days, you hear people talking about the need for private fundraising. ALA conferences have multiple concurrent sessions on fundraising, articles dealing with fundraising in library publications abound, and listservs everywhere are dissecting the pros and cons of private fundraising.
Libraries need more vocal advocates than ever. It seems clear that trustees, as some of a library system’s more visible volunteers, need to make their voices heard with regard to advocacy as well.
Fifteen years ago, Library Journal launched its first annual book-buying survey of public libraries nationwide. Although materials budgets were referenced, the report focused almost exclusively on book budgets and book circulation. This year, in long-overdue recognition of what today’s collections really look like—and what the reports have been covering for years—the entire effort has been rebranded the materials survey. Further distancing itself from its roots, the new survey will leave comparison of operating costs to LJ’s annual budget survey and concentrate exclusively on budget and circulation trends for the wide array of materials in public libraries today.
Pennsylvania’s Keystone Recreation, Park and Conservation Fund awarded more than $3.7 million in grants to 15 public libraries across the state, Governor Corbett’s administration announced on February 14. The funds will be used to finance repairs and upgrades to library facilities. Through a competitive grant process, applicants could qualify for up to $500,000, which must be equally matched. This year’s recipients were chosen from among 28 applicants.
Columbus Metropolitan Library, 2010’s LJ Library of the Year, launched its Library Fund Library Facilities Notes Sale on Nov. 15, 2012, to help fund its 2020 Vision Plan. Notes are a shorter-term, more flexible debt instrument than bonds, and can be sold in smaller amounts. The notes sold out in three hours, the library said in a statement, with three times as much interest than the amount of notes available.
The Houston Public Library (HPL) will restore Saturday service to 14 neighborhood libraries for the first time in three years, bringing the total of branches open on Saturdays to 41.
The Texas State Library and Archives Commission (TSLAC) released a study which found that in 2011 alone, the economic benefit from Texas public libraries totaled $2.407 billion. Collectively the libraries cost less than $0.545 billion, for a return on investment of $4.42 for each dollar spent.
Forced to absorb a 33 percent drop—a cool $1 million—in their materials budget, Gwinnett County Public Library (GCPL), officials are already strategizing for FY 2014, figuring out ways to ration resources for a 15-branch network that continues to grow in usage.
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