Research on Fundraising for University Libraries in Taiwan
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Huang, Li-Min
Abstract
Fundraising is a new way to help university libraries to fight for limited budget since the official support from the government and universities is gradually declining over the last two decades. There is little research on this topic in our country, so this study aims at revealing current situation of university library fundraising in Taiwan, and find out the possible solutions on library fundraising work. The research methods applied in this study include literature review, web-content analysis and in-depth interview: the literature includes fundraising theories, methods and successful case studies of the university libraries in the United States. The web-contents being analyzed are retrieved from 12 university libraries in the “Aim for the Top University Plan” administered by the Ministry of Education (Taiwan). As for the in-depth review, the interviewees are 12 university librarians and 10 managers from these 12 university libraries. This study finds four major general principles for university libraries when doing fundraising work: first, establishing a team to undertake library fundraising, second, seeking potential donors, third, participating in other fundraising activities, and the final step is maintaining a good fundraising management. Furthermore, some essential elements commonly mentioned by the fundraising experts: support from university principal, commitment of librarian, fundraising goals that live up to donors’ expectations, and an extensive fundraising network. Based on the interview result, most university libraries in Taiwan have not focused on fundraising work, and there are relatively few donors who are willing to donate to university libraries. Although almost every library has general guidelines on fundraising, few of them actively promote the need of fundraising. It may result from the lack of professional fundraisers in the libraries or proper fundraising training to library staffs. The most common practices on fundraising are: promoting fundraising news via library websites, attracting funding with needing on library collection and space, encouraging donors give small amounts of money to support academic journals, and cooperating with enterprises and companies. However, there are three difficulties on fundraising work mentioned by the 12 university librarians: for one, most librarians and even university librarians are not aware of the necessities and the imperative of fundraising, and librarians also lack of fundraising training; for another, the universities usually do not support library fundraising; for yet another, the donors’ motivation to give to university libraries is not strong. From the research result, the researcher have some suggestions to universities and university libraries: the university chairperson or financial manager should give more support to libraries; the university librarians need to lead the whole library to learn how to be a fundraiser, and they also have to market their libraries to attract gifts; the staffs have to be more open-minded and understand the need on fundraising. This paper is a preliminary study on fundraising for university libraries in Taiwan. The research explores possible ways to address fundraising challenges and hope to build a prospective fundraising program. Further studies on a larger scale investigating on other university libraries, or the studies on donors’ motivation, will be recommended.
Subjects
university libraries
fundraising
fundraising for university libraries
Type
thesis
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