Grant Money through Collaborative Partnerships

Citation

Hamburger, S. (2013), "Grant Money through Collaborative Partnerships", Collection Building, Vol. 32 No. 3, pp. 124-124. https://doi.org/10.1108/CB-04-2013-0016

In these trying economic times alternative sources of funding for libraries, whether for special projects or basic maintenance, have become less of a remote possibility and more of a necessity. Grant funding agencies, however, increasingly prefer to spend their money on cooperative or collaborative projects to affect more than one recipient at a time. While there is a plethora of books on how to write grants, and several on collaborating, this is the first one to deal with how libraries and librarians can collaborate with external partners for mutual financial benefit.

Reminiscent of coach Béla Károlyi urging on Olympic gymnast Kerri Strug with his shouts of “You can do it!”, Maxwell here champions librarians as the ones to take the initiative in pursuing potential partners and insinuating libraries into grant proposals. While acknowledging a role for academic libraries, she mainly addresses public libraries in her examples and focuses on community collaborations. Maxwell calls upon librarians' strengths in research as the bulwark of what they can bring to the relationship. By being prepared in advance with library needs and costs, librarians can enhance a grant proposal with specific benefits and outcomes. Her recommendation that a librarian be on the planning committee to help shape the grant proposal rather than being called in as an afterthought to fix it or help spend the money is spot‐on.

The only downsides to this book are its brevity and the assumption that librarians need to tack themselves on to someone else's grant proposal rather than initiating the proposal and looking for an external partner to join them. The brevity could have been addressed better with additional examples of collaborations, how they found each other, what role each played, and how they assessed the outcomes. The success stories are inspirational; failures would be good to include as a way of learning what to avoid.

Maxwell has written an overview rather than a handbook. It is just the sort of book a librarian or grant developer can read in one day and become fired up to take action.