Beyond `Cap in Hand' Funding of Rental Collections: The Establishment of High Demand Collections at Tauranga District Libraries

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The establishment of rental collections under a quasi commercial self funding mechanism is described. This requires the separation of the rental collections' revenue and expenditure accounting mechanisms from total library revenues and expenditures. Having established rental collection revenues and expenditure (including overheads) the success or failure of the rental collections to meet their own costs can be monitored. The mechanism allows the commercial freedom to expand existing rental collections or establish and grow new media rental collections in order to respond to demands

Many New Zealand libraries operate revenue generating rental collections.

New Zealand metropolitan libraries reported over $2,700,000 of revenue from rental collections in 1998/99.[1] The money earned appears in budgets and reports but is not generally related to costs of providing the rental collection service. This can be disadvantageous in two ways.

* while there may be an assumption that revenue from the rental collections is meeting or exceeding the cost of providing rental services, this cannot be demonstrated

* funding of the rental collection is another budgetary item, usually increased or decreased on an annual basis in an incremental fashion. While one may suspect that increased funding will produce more revenue there is no formal mechanism for relating materials funding to revenue, or measuring that relationship

A high demand based rental collection model was conceived in the Tauranga District Libraries following a review of the fiction collections. The model sought to gain more revenue from the collections through increased turnover, increased charges, and reduced …