Hey there, librarians!  Welcome to today’s show.  In this episode, I’m going to be talking about your money. You can find show notes at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-14.

Do you know where your library money comes from? Are you aware of your various funding streams, what rules govern those, and how to ask and justify increases? 

If not, I want you to change that.

My first job out of graduate school was as a hospital library director for a small hospital in Colorado. Not far into my first week, my supervisor, the Director of Nursing, told me I would need to submit my budget for the coming year and get it to her by a certain date.

My budget.  Hmm.  

No one ever taught me a single thing about creating a budget in my MLS program. I knew what a budget was, but I had no idea how to create one for a library – especially from scratch.

I told her that and she, being a really wonderful boss, taught me. 

Best thing that could have happened. 

I had to learn a lot of things quickly to do that budget and that only got me up to speed faster. Sadly, the hospital was sold and turned into a clinic about a year after I arrived and I had to leave. 

So in my next job, I was working for what was then called the National Library of Medicine’s Regional Medical Library program – and I had to not only prepare a budget, I had to write grants.  Grants for hospital library collections, but also grants to fund my position.

I had never written a grant in my life – at that time, I hardly even knew what they were.

So, I told my supervisor and, since I was still fairly new in my career, she was happy to teach me. 

Best thing ever. 

By the time I left that position, I could write a budget to create a library from the ground up and write the grant to get it funded. All this in my first three years on the job. 

What did this teach me and why am I talking about it now?  

It taught me that, in order to be really effective in your library job, you have to know where your money comes from and how to ask for it.

You have to understand your budget and your funding streams.

For complete show notes, visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-14.