A Shoestring and a Dream

On Friday, October 30, the LACUNY Collection Development Roundtable hosted a panel discussion entitled “A Shoestring and a Dream: Collaborative Fundraising across CUNY Libraries” in the Graduate Center’s lovely Skylight Room. There were between fifteen and twenty CUNY librarians in attendance, as well as the three speakers: Susan Shiroma, Senior Librarian at the Foundation Center; Tracy L. Thompson-Przylucki, Executive Director, New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO); and Curtis Kendrick, CUNY University Librarian.

I introduced the event, thanking both the LACUNY Budget Committee and LACUNY President Jane Fitzpatrick for their help with food, equipment, and room reservations. I also gave some background on the event, which grew out of early efforts to reach out to other subject librarians in one of my areas to discuss the possibility of collaborative collection development. Although some people were enthusiastic and receptive, some said that people had broached the topic before but it never panned out or they did not see it as a possibility. Others did not respond at all. I have a few theories about why more people did not consider this an option, but the one underlying reason that we probably all face is funding.

Susan Shiroma, Tracy L. Thompson-Przylucki, Curtis Kendrick, Daisy Domínguez

Then, last year, when Rob Laurich was Chair of the Collection Development Roundtable, he called a meeting to discuss the ways that our schools were dealing with the economic situation. One of the points made at that meeting was that we need to be more proactive in our collection development efforts. One of the ways this can be interpreted is not just reacting to budget cuts but being proactive in our efforts to seek funding so that our resources are not cut during troubled times but also so that we supplement our funding and acquiring resources during the good times as well.

In thinking about a program that could build on collaborative collection development, I thought we could use member comments about having a proactive approach and explore one way in which we could put that approach into practice. To have a practical discussion with real-life experiences, we sought speakers with knowledge about finding, writing, and evaluating grant applications. We also sought someone with in-depth knowledge of the CUNY culture, its challenges and its possibilities, someone who could help us envision how we could put the lessons learned by our first speakers into play. That’s how “A Shoestring and a Dream” materialized.

Our first speaker, Susan Shiroma, presented “Building Your Fundraising Skills as a Collection Development Librarian.” She discussed the many resources available at the Foundation Center and provided us with a printout of grants recently awarded to CUNY. The Foundation Center website includes online reference service and some free web presentations. If your school does not have a site license to the Foundation Directory Online database, try your school’s grants office; it might have single-user access.

Tracy L. Thompson-Przylucki, presented “Mission Accomplished! Grants as a Means to your Ends Despite the Economy.”  As director and grant writer for NELLCO, Tracy had many words of wisdom for librarians starting out in collaborative grant writing. She noted that her consortium had taken baby steps, earning a grant for fax machines in the early 1990s, to reach their recently awarded National Leadership Grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to develop the Universal Search Solution as an open-source discovery platform. Tracy highlighted the importance of a sense of trust and demonstrated commitment among consortium members.

In terms of our specific interest in collection development, she asked us to consider what collaborative collection development means to us.  Do we want a buy-in from our organization, or do we want to cut down on redundancies? Do we have any projects in mind? She counseled us to share our ideas amongst ourselves; to talk to our grants departments to find out what others are working on and whether we might be able to work as sub-grantees; to learn at places like the Foundation Center; and to build a relationship with funders. Tracy’s PowerPoint may be found on the LACUNY Collection Development Roundtable webpage.

Curtis Kendrick then presented “Collaboration at CUNY:  Challenges and Opportunities.” Among the advantages Curtis cited were our compelling mission, our geographic location, and the possibility of working with several partners including LACUNY as well as CUNY Central. In terms of challenges, he noted different cultures on different campuses where not all collaborative collection grant writing project partners would have the same latitude. He also suggested opportunities in collaborating with partners from outside CUNY as well as within.

Our question-and-answer period lasted until the end of our allotted time. Some of the questions included one by Beth Evans (Brooklyn) who asked about the difficulty of finding outright purchase grants. One way to work around this is to think about resources as administrative overhead since some grants allow for this. Kenneth Schlessinger (Lehman) noted that 1.5% of grants come to his library and encouraged us to establish relationships with other departments towards this end. I hope that the discussion and ideas exchanged during this event continue on campuses and lead to collaborative fundraising across CUNY Libraries.

Daisy Domínguez (City)