User Services and Programming Discussion #6: Funding and Budgets
10 April 2025
In your Program Proposal, you'll have to provide the following:
• Estimated Budget (Fully Funded) - Let's say you get a grant or there's money in the budget or donors/partners pitch in. If you could get whatever you needed to get the program running, around what would it cost?
• Work Arounds (Limited Funds) - In reality, funds are often scarce. What can't you live without? What can you live with? What could you do if you had less or run into obstacles?
Briefly tell everyone what you're working on, then answer the questions above. Feel free to also use this space to ask for feedback or ideas from the group.
After spreading hearsay that my library of work lacks any services designed to assist with digital literacy in the idea generator, I made a short search of internal documents to find any mention of services that had been ran in the past. As it turns out, there are, in fact, not one, but two technology instruction services held solely at my branch (though not during any of my regular hours). With that obviated, that left me with the more mundane option that I have a much more vested interest in developing—a comic book club for teens.
Although libraries and book clubs may be synonymous as apples and pie, they haven't necessarily been exclusive, as the first book clubs were recreational activities for women in homes they were then-perpetually-bound in. A symbiotic relationship would begin to develop as librarianship came into its own, one that Hooper (2016) calls an "axis of love [...] the basis of librarians’ interest and involvement in book clubs [and] where personal and professional interests intersect and feed nourishment to each side of a librarian’s mind."
Such a relationship has, at least in my estimation, led to such an ubiquitous enmeshment with library services that there wouldn't be much of a need to seek funding for another book club. If you're getting a club off the ground, you're probably picking titles with a high level of interest, which means books that have an excess of circulating copies or another baked-in method to secure materials for your participants, so as to not pull any load-bearing blocks from the library's budget. And as plenty of us already know, this is already baked into many resourced public libraries' services, including my own, with book group in a bag programs, which provide 10 or so copies of a book gathered together for checkout similar to other items.
What seems to be spreading as standard practice with youth-oriented book clubs, though, is including extra incentives or engaging activities in meeting itineraries, like offering snacks or creative activities related to the subject book or theme (Partch, 2025). Not only am I not the "crafty" type (at least in the conventional sense), my goal is to facilitate discussion so engaging that these kinds of bribes wouldn't be necessary outside of the first few instances, unless the system already considers either to be standard.
In my current system's case, the primary concern is variety. CRRL's Book Group in a Bag service offers over 400 titles for checkout; but of those hundreds, only 7 are teen graphic novels. Even were that not the case, if the club were to enjoy consistent attendance from a sizable group of teens, the established collection budget couldn't accommodate for such temporary flare-ups, as the average new graphic novel release gets 4 copies, or 3 copies for manga or later entries in a series.
Fortunately, a source for comic-related funding is obvious in its singularity: the Will Eisner Graphic Novel Grants for Libraries. This grant is offered by the ALA's Graphic Novels & Comics Round Table for "[facilitating] library-generated programs and services that will promote graphic novels to library patrons and to the local community" (2018). The award totals $4,000, which includes $2,000 for comic collection development purchases, $1,000 to host a graphic novel-themed event, and another $1,000 to attend ALA's annual conference to accept the funds.
$1,000 is more than enough to supplies for activities or snacks for a half-dozen or so teens for a good while, though I suspect word of free food might inflate attendance that'll go through it faster than normal. (I honestly have no idea what a good budget for the average instance of an event usually is, so if someone here does, please throw it at me.) $2,000 for collection development is also nothing to scoff at—but with a single graphic novel going for about $19 on average (School Library Journal, 2024), supplying enough copies for 6 participants at $114 will eat that through in a couple years (though I'm pretty sure this price is without the baked-in discount that vendors offer to libraries).
Which should be expected, of course—like all grant-funded initiatives, the extra goodies that come from the extra money won't last forever, likely leaving club members with just the 'ol camaraderie between comic lovers. If the club is a consistent enough success, I'd hope it could get a tiny carve-out in the budget to supply extra books or book club kits; but even not, I'd welcome the opportunity to bolster CRRL's graphic novel collection.
References
Hooper, B. (2016). The librarian’s guide to book programs and author events. ALA Editions.
Partch, J. (2025, January 9). Starting a graphic novel book group at your library. ALSC Blog. https://www.alsc.ala.org/blog/2025/01/starting-a-graphic-novel-book-group-at-your-library/
School Library Journal (2024, February 29). SLJ's 2023 average book prices. https://www.slj.com/story/slj-average-book-prices-2023-follett-baker-taylor