Finance

Bad news from the council meeting last week - the councillors are requiring the library to raise 10% of its total budget in 2010 with this target increasing by 2% each year till it reaches 20%. The library managers already have a plan for implementing this for next year but we don't know what this is yet. Some councillors think we should charge for all fiction books (except children's) rather than just the Top Titles. One thing is for sure - we won't be offering free Internet any time soon - this brings in too much revenue. Whilst reading Librarians and the claiming of new roles: How can we try to make a difference? (Fourie, 2004, p. 67-68 ) some ideas occurred to me. We don't want to increase the charges to the general public, so what about developing some new services for business that we can charge for? Some possibilities mentioned in the article are: offering training in information retrieval, offering an advice service on issues to do with copyright and intellectual property, archiving company websites and offering a current awareness service.