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  • Fundraising:Collaboration, Impact, and Assessment
  • Sarah M. Pritchard (bio)

Most academic libraries are actively involved in external fundraising, whether it's seeking private philanthropy, foundation support, government grants, or corporate sponsorships. This is not only a major responsibility of the director, it extends more and more to other library staff, including development officers, curators, public relations officers, and associate directors. The recent financial setbacks have had a paradoxical effect, both increasing the need and reducing the availability of these supplementary resources that are so critical to library innovation and the development of distinctive collections and services. In seeking to cope with the enormous changes in the economic landscape of higher education, universities and other institutions are emphasizing greater collaboration and more definitive assessment. Unlike the numerous studies of library operations such as digital systems, collection building, or instructional services, writings about library fundraising seem slower to address these dimensions of strategic collaboration and formal assessment. For an area that takes so much leadership commitment and has so much potential for campus impact, there should be many more substantive studies of effectiveness, long-term impact, sustainable program models, and stakeholder engagement, to portray a complete picture of the investment in and outcomes of library fundraising.

There has been a useful and targeted body of published literature and conference programming on library fundraising growing since the 1990s. Most of it is especially valuable for the director or development staff who are new to this work and who do not have a close relationship with a development office at the parent university or municipality. But the existing literature is largely focused on practical advice, procedures, [End Page 595] techniques, and examples of successful activities for particular purposes. It has changed little over the last twenty years in terms of 1) the strategic mechanisms suggested for library fundraising, 2) the implications of fundraising for the overall academic integration of the library, or 3) the means to assess fundraising in ways that go beyond simply a dollar count. Despite the fact that over this time period there has been steady growth in the numbers of library development officers, and some remarkable accomplishments in library fundraising—major building projects, digital initiatives, endowed positions, and more—there has been no formal evaluation research undertaken to study the longitudinal evolution of this work. It is now an era of sharper competition for resources and new forms of multi-institutional allegiances, suggesting that library development must change as well to remain adept.

Let me briefly address each of these three issues, suggesting a range of topics on which we would like to encourage more in-depth analysis and subsequent articles in portal. First, the charting of strategies for library development in the changing higher education context can be summed up as, "It's not about us anymore." Academic library fundraising is starting to mirror academic library services overall, with a range of carefully planned partnerships on campus that help advance both the library and another area, whether for a shared initiative or just as part of a longer-term relationship. Examples of the former might be the library and an academic department joining to raise funds for a particular subject via a professorship with a paired materials endowment; the latter might be exemplified by the athletics department that collaborates to donate a percentage of game proceeds to support a library reading room or book fund. Surprisingly, such collaborations are almost absent from the formal literature of library fundraising, with the exception being a smattering of informal library conference presentations.1 One of the best such overviews is, ironically, by a university president and not a librarian, in a speech given by C.D. Mote to the Association of Research Libraries in 1998.2 Mote makes several telling observations: we need to view fundraising activities as would those outside of our organizations; we need to build ongoing external relationships; and we need to emphasize multi-unit interests to achieve an integrated campus mission. This perspective is lacking from most articles about library fundraising, which are remarkably self-centered and focused exclusively on library-specific projects and audiences, even if we know well that fundraising in many libraries is not that...

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