Page 135 - DLIS003_LIBRARY ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT

Library Administration and Management

Notes 7.5 Principles of Budget Making

The budgets of different libraries vary considerably. Nevertheless, there are some elements
which are essential and common for different library budgets. They may be reduced to a few
guiding principles and applied to the perpetration of any library budget. These guidelines are
discussed below:
The librarian should be invited by the authorities to submit the library budget. The
librarian in turn must consult his departmental heads about book funds, and the library
staff members about personnel and other administrative costs. The final choice of what
goes into the budget and how much to ask for should rest with the librarian.

The librarian should request sufficient funds in each head of the budget to support a sound
programme of library development. Calculating the expenditure and anticipating income,
inflation rate, foreign exchange rates, salary increases, insurance rate, public utility charges,
time-delay, etc. are very important.

The budget should be prepared and submitted in time. This facilitates recruitment of
additional staff, ordering of materials and so on in a proper way. The budget should
represent library planning in terms of educational goals and should not simply be a
“crisis” operation in which urgent current needs are hastily converted into rupee estimates
to meet a budget deadline. Planning to meet educational goals implies that the library
will take into account proposed new curricular changes, the impact of new courses on
library books and personnel, the effect of price increases in binding and the like.

The budget should be reasonably flexible in its execution; classification of the budget
categories should enable the library to check its financial records easily against the periodic
balance statements.
Some important sources of finance for a library or information centre, include (i) regular grants
from parent organisation and/or government, (ii) ad hoc grants or subsidies, (iii) fines, fees and
service charges.
Important heads of expenditure of an information centre or library are (i) collection building
and updating (books, journals, reports, etc.,) (ii) binding and other maintenance costs,
(iii) furniture and equipment, (iv) building, (v) salaries and wages, (vi) stationery, postage, etc.
Depending on the size of the library or information centre and the nature of its parent
organisation the complexity of the budget and the budgetary control system may vary from a
simple fairly fixed (constant) voted grant of the budget from the parent organisation for books,
journals and other reading materials to a most complex situation where grants are received
from the parent institution and other agencies in addition to certain revenues earned. These
sources of finance may have several restrictions in their deployment. Allocation has to be done
to all heads as explained above and by type of material (i.e., books, journals, reports, etc.), by
subjects, or by departments and so on. The budgeting method used by a library or information
centre is normally decided by the parent institution.

Notes “Effective budgeting can display endless variety” (Newton, 1981, p1313).

7.5.1 Justifying the Budget Request

The final decision about the library budget is often taken by the chief executive of the parent
organization. The officials who are responsible for providing library funds will quite naturally

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