20 Ways to Make Money

20 Ways to make money for your Library

Let me begin with the waiver and a quote from that great heroine Mae West. When a friend admiring a necklace remarked “Goodness what diamonds” West retorted “Goodness had nothing to do with it. I make no comment on the morality of any of the following ideas, but assert that all of them are legal. All of them are being employed in some library, but so far as I am aware no library employs all of them. To quote Mae West again “when faced with a choice between two evils - I take one”.

Most of the ways are or will be well known to you, some of them will be right for your library and some wrong. Some will be a diversion from your real job and not worth the effort. Only you can be the judge. So without any view of their morality or effectiveness, I simply want to give twenty examples in twenty minutes of money raising schemes. You will note that for some of them you have to invest capital, so a little market research is a good idea. For others the objective is as much to broaden the range of services you offer to the client group. But almost without exception the intention is to identify your assets and then make them work.

1 . Penalties. The most obvious of these is fines, which may hardly be worth the effort, unless you have a fairly large population of users. It is always worth remembering that fines are wholly self-inflicted and should be set at a level to deter abusers of the system. In some libraries fines are set so low that students treat them as a hire charge. So remember that fines protect the innocent as well as punishing the guilty. Another small area is a penalty charge for the extra administration involved in such things as buying replacement books, replacing missing reader cards, providing out-of-hours access, letters of accreditation, answering genealogical enquiries and so on. You'll never get rich on this, but it is arguably correct to charge for the diversion of resource away from good readers to the propping up of the socially inadequate, such as senior professors or senior registrars. And make sure you charge the full cost and not some notional sum. The Halifax Building Society has calculated that 20% of its accounts contain less than 0.2% of its funds. By extension they cause a disproportionate amount of work.

2. Photocopying. A legal requirement here which is all too often misunderstood. You are not only required to charge the full cost, but also to make a profit. Under the new CLA Licensing scheme readers may not really even go and make copies on departmental machines which they will claim is cheaper. You can increase the revenue by making current or recent issues of journals reference only, thus forcing users to make their copies on library machines. The use of card based systems such as flexicard also brings in a bonus in that the money comes up front rather than in arrears. You can also use things like the matriculation process to sell cards to almost all new students. Some of them will not darken your doors, hence giving a profit. We also find that income exceeds expenditure, which leads us to conclude that most students leave the institution still with some credit on their card. Again profit to us. If you don't want hassle, or perhaps for internal political reasons, you can do a deal with a service company which will install and run photocopying systems and pay you a fee for allowing them on the premises.

3 . Membership schemes. These will not apply universally, but where you have a large external clientele, you can charge. Depending on your location you can target the local business community. In our case we are the nearest law library to the Inns of Court and we pump them mercilessly. In this case we find that a request for cash donations is more effective than a membership scheme. Lawyers prefer us to crawl and grovel on an annual basis. Then what about a Friends of the Library. That can again bring in small but worthwhile bits of revenue. More importantly if you want something special, you can launch an appeal to or through them.

4 . On-line services. There is a range of options here. You can offer a free service, but charge for more than, say, twenty, references. You could charge for time, beyond half an hour. You can charge for materials or telecommunications. You can charge for some CD activities. We charge for mediated CD searches - just a few people do actually want them. You can use your photocopy card to charge for CD printout. You can charge for SDI services in any medium. Now that some services such as Science Citation Index are becoming freely available to the end user, you can charge for value added services such as training or publications describing these services. Then there is the potential for screen-savers which advertise. At least two companies have just begun to market this service.

5 . Publications and souvenirs. There are always some even if only postcards and Christmas cards. [Show Karolinska cards] You may have older or local interest items which can be published and sold. You might do a deal to receive review copies. Nature gave us some for allowing use of the library by their staff; then there is clothing [Edinburgh sweatshirt]. People will by anything which shows they [I prefer the one not produced by the Library Association, which says "Librarians do it on the fly".

[Slide] You can have watches made.

or take this page showing promotional materials which you must have seen in magazines on trains. There is even a journal devoted to promotional materials. You can have pens, ties, key-rings, rulers, calculators, umbrellas, badges, torches, wine and so on, all with your logo and all at affordable prices. People will buy anything, just look at a Blackpool souvenir shop. As Colonel Barnum of Barnum and Bailey’s circus put it “No one ever went broke by underestimating public taste”.

6 . ILL. The BL now says we should charge, at least for those items supplied as photocopies. We at least have decided that a flat rate charge is easier. But why not dress it up and offer expensive rush services and fax services, even hand delivery in some institutions.

7 . Loan of CD and video. The obvious areas are work related, but you can branch out into lending music CD, cassette and videos. Why should the public library have a monopoly on recreational services. CHEST - the Combined Higher Education Software Team has a special deal to sell CD-Players . These are intended for use with data discs such as Medline. However, they come apart to make a Walkman, so you could even hire out the CD player to housemen on call or to night security staff as well as the recreational CD’s, thus maximising their use.

8 . Reservations. Charges for reservations are common in public libraries. Its worth looking at, if only to recover some of the postage from those who wont use the internal mail and who require material delivered to a home address

9. Training and agency services. Training is perhaps the biggest potential growth area. As on-line services grow, the need for quality training grows with it. You can charge departments for training courses - if they are good enough. Lampeter gets one third of students to attend a first year course on information management. Library staff run the course and the Library is paid accordingly. More difficult is to offer to act as consultants for local or specialised businesses. This is a very crowded field and so you have to be good. Another service is co-operative purchase. For example we purchase tattle-tape triggers for the University of London and doing this in bulk attracts huge discount. We then sell on to others, splitting the saving. This is very beneficial to small institutions who otherwise pay the top undiscounted rate. But if you have the space you can do this for everything from photocopier paper to lightpens.

10. External reference services to industry and commerce. Again another obvious one. In it I would also include charging out, especially to the NHS, for the provision of basic services to major client groups for which you are not funded. Here its also worth trying to put together a local consortium with other libraries, so that you can cover a range of services. Science Parks are another obvious target. Creating a specialised but necessary database is another area which can provide a lucrative commercial outlet. Offer your research services to film and tv companies. There are a lot of them now and they need accurate research.

11. Service charges. We have introduced charges for PhD students who want to use the library for a period beyond that for which they are registered. You can charge for holding institutional archives and making them available. It’s amazing how many people need to prove that they worked, studied or resided in a particular place at a particular time. You can charge students of genealogy and, as already mentioned for lost books and reader cards. You can up revenue by having a minimum fee or a handling charge for everything, irrespective of quantity. So why not a minimum charge of £5 for any photocopy supplied by post.

12. Book sales of withdrawn items. Again another obvious but lucrative area, whether a trolley at the desk or are selling to the book trade. My proudest sale was the Book of Mormon in Norwegian. Once you have a collection management policy (NB NOT a collection development policy) stock withdrawal and sale becomes routine. If you are lending CD and videos as suggested previously, they too can be put in with the second hand material.

13. Room and exhibition hire space. You can sometimes persuade publishers to display their latest material. Some will leave the book display rather than pay a fee. If you have a room that is empty for any part of the day, it’s not earning its keep. Why not hire it out? As importantly if you are giving it away for free at present - why? Have you got an agreed and argued reason for doing so?

14. Reproduction fees. This covers everything from someone using a portrait for a frontispiece in his obscure memoirs to reproduction of an item on TV in a programme with a million pound budget, so fees have to be scaled by potential audience rather than the intrinsic merit of the item. This also shows that archive and realia material can be exploitable and not just a nuisance.

15. Rental of books. I know little about this, but it has been done at the University of Surrey via local bookshop as a way of making extra copies of textbooks available to students. The cases where it will be workable may be small, but it is possibly worth exploring in disciplines with a small set and stable booklist.

16.Rental of equipment. You can do almost anything here. personal computers, CD players (as I mentioned), cassette players, software packages, typewriters, microscopes. The possibilities are almost endless. There will be a growth in student use of pc’s so why not rent out laptops? Oxford Brooke’s does this very successfully.

17.Rental of space and sale of materials. Space has a price, so why not charge for the prime space such as lockers and carrells. Similarly you can charge for materials. People have always come to issue desks looking for the loan of a pen; sell them one. These days they come needing things like floppy disks; why not sell that too.

18.Binding. Cheap binding at least is open to everyone. Students will flock to a service which does things as simple as spiral binding for reports and project work. You can also act as a middle man in having things bound properly at your own commercial binder. This tends to be a small but lucrative area since there is little overt competition and the general public have neither the machines for cheap binding nor the contacts for proper binding.

19.Advertising. This will perhaps tend to be a non-paying service. You can protect books by giving away or selling carrier bags which advertise you or perhaps your services [example]; You might even get a bookseller to pay for their production if they can advertise on the other side. People like banks will put their logos on student cards and pay for them, thus saving you money; bookmarks will be supplied free if they carry advertising. This can save by preventing toast, bacon or even less desirable items being used as bookmarks, thus extending the life of the book. I drew the line at this when I was offered several thousand copies of a bookmark advertising The European; objecting to Robert Maxwell seemed better than taking his cash. Some advertising may just not be desirable. Could a hospital library take money from Rothmans? Why did Aberdeen University allow a new library to be named after Robert Maxwell, or Oxford have a chair paid for by Rupert Murdoch. Schools have recently been encouraged to put advertising hoardings on their walls. Do you have wall space that could carry advertising? It was suggested for schools recently? Why not? Some advertising can be considered information transmission as a public service. And we are information professionals.

20. Vending machines. This covers telephones (you can also then sell telephone cards, as well as food and drink. If you are willing to go that far, would you put in fruit machines or computer games. If not, what about a photobooth? Barnet Public Libraries have them Do you have social space under your control where any or all of these activities would seem comfortable. Make sure space is earning its keep.

You were promised 20 items in twenty minutes. Another golden rule is to give value for money, so

five per cent bonus and add a twenty-first

21. Health Libraries Review Vol 7 (1990) ppl-7. Beatrice Doran tells there of how she undertook fundraising in Ireland. She covers some of the ground I've been doing here, but in addition throws in the concept of sponsored fundraising events such as concerts, public lectures and a fun~run.

The other golden rule is to know when to stop.