Chair Williams asks about city budget support; library directors respond
Chair Williams asks whether the city budget provides sufficient support for research centers and what percentage of each library system's city budget goes to research collections. Joy Bivens, Shakira Smalls, and Natiba Guy-Clement provide funding details and needs.
I love that.
Just one more question, because I know my colleagues have questions.
I know people want to testify, so I don't want to take up too much time.
But Nativa did touch on it.
It's always important to ask these questions, even outside of our budget cycle.
But does the city budget provide sufficient support for these centers and collections?
If not, what additional funding is needed from the city?
And then if you could just share what percentage of the city budget allocated to each library system goes to support its research centers and collections.
And if you have the amount, that would be helpful.
So Julie mentioned this during her testimony.
37% of our budget comes from public funds.
29% of that is city funds.
8% of that is state.
So the answer to do we need more money is always yes.
It's yes, yes, yes, and yes.
And I think that what that provides is an opportunity for us to make sure that our capacity is appropriate to serve our communities and to preserve these materials.
I think I speak for everybody, yes.
So 95% of Queens Public Library's funding relies on city funding.
However, we do not get any funding from the city for our research collection.
We are fortunate to get the Coalition for Theaters of Color that amplifies our research collection, but we do not have any city funding specifically for our research collection.
Yes, and as I said in our testimony, we just rely on the general city funding for all of Brooklyn Public Library.
We also get about 20% in private funds.
We've been fortunate to also have received discretionary grants from a few of our council members and from the New York State Assembly.
If we had more funding, of course, we would want to just do more, have more kids in our building, have more exhibitions, be able to better preserve our collections,
looking to ways to store our collections so that it doesn't impact researcher use.
So we have a wish list on our end if we did have more funding.