A Glaring Lapse

When I began my tenure as a library director, one of the things that caused me the most trepidation was the thought of putting together a budget. When the time came, I did the best I could with no financial training and as much knowledge about the finances of the library as I could gather. I made sure to check the budget with anyone who might know enough to give constructive comment. Remarkably, it held up rather well in the following year, and it was far less stressful to put together the next budget. But it should never have been this way.

This experience, and subsequent work with others in the field of library and information science, revealed a glaring oversight in how librarians are trained. I cannot speak for graduate programs other than my own, but the lack of training in basic finance is not only a surprising lapse but a disservice to the field as a whole. How can we be expected to effectively lead our organizations if we don't have the training we need to thrive? How can we make the best use of our resources when some of us don't know enough to be able to cobble together a realistic budget?

Perhaps even librarians are guilty about being dismissive of our field. Surely a class in collection management, and one in administration should be enough to run a library, we may think. Yet this sells short what we do. Those who end up in library leadership aren't merely managing a collection of books, some tiny little reading room in a corner of town; we are tasked with leading what is often one of the largest nonprofit organizations in the communities we serve. In what other nonprofit enterprise would it be acceptable to put someone in leadership without expecting that they've received some basic education in finances? 

Public libraries in Pennsylvania continue to need, and advocate for, more funding from the state. And increased support is indeed essential to repairing many library services damaged by deep cuts in funding made since 2007. But how can we as librarians make the best use of these resources if some of us don't know how to realistically calculate how much we'll have to pay our staff in the coming year? Even those of us without training learn eventually, but libraries can be badly damaged during this learning curve, and it needn't be this way.

Budgets and library finances were discussed during my library administration class, but this education was in the abstract and insufficient. What is needed is a separate, required, course on finances for non-profits, with a strong focus on library budgeting, and non-profit fundraising. It may well be asserted that this course would be unnecessary for those who don't expect to end up in library leadership, but it could be readily argued in response that many of those who end up in library leadership, including myself, would have never expected that they would ever assume that role. Even for those who do not, this financial training would benefit them in allowing them to more effectively create and implement program budgets, and better understand whatever financial documents they are exposed to--and no one could say that this would be a bad thing.

I have long resisted the idea that non-profits, including libraries, should model themselves after businesses. Non-profits are not businesses, and have very different aims. But at the same time, the budget must still balance, and realistically represent the library's financial situation; this is at once basic and essential to the success of a library's mission in its community. More rigorous financial training in library and information science programs would help make this happen, without an extended period of financial trial and error. If we expect others outside the profession to take us seriously, we must first take ourselves seriously enough to demand this. Or we can continue to see first and second year library leaders flail and possibly flounder, while libraries, and the communities they serve, suffer.