We’ve been watching our funds dwindle before our eyes over the last few months, and some days it gets damned depressing.  We’re running low on pens, and pencils, and forms … and just how translucent is toilet paper supposed to be, anyway???

I feel the pinch as a young adult librarian when it comes to my programs.  I used to be reimbursed out of petty cash when I bought refreshments for my weekly teen advisory group meetings.  But then the branch funds dwindled, and if it came to a choice between Doritos and juice boxes and something else for the branch, I knew that I would just have to supply the refreshments myself from now on.  It’s not a major expense, but as a weekly program it does add up.

Then there’s the summer reading club planning.  We used to get a bunch of small prizes leading up to one big prize that we could raffle off.  As the years passed, the bunch of small prizes turned into a few small prizes.  Now this year there are no small prizes at all.   Each library in our system will get one (or possibly two or three) “big” prizes that we can raffle off to the teens in our summer reading club.  Which is all very well and good, but I would rather have at least something that every kid could definitely earn, rather than dangling a prize over their heads that they MIGHT get.  Wasn’t that a plot point of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn?  Maybe that’s the only part of the book that I remember.  Or perhaps I’m thinking of another book altogether.

So now I’m going through my office and sorting through the freebies and leftover prizes from previous summers to try to figure out some kind of a progressive prize system.  One of my major sources of summer reading prize supplements was always the bag of free stuff that I picked up from the New York Comic Con.  But unfortunately, they’ve had a very inconsistent schedule over the last few years, and now they’re going to be joining with the New York Anime Festival AND they won’t be held again until October.  Which means that they will do me no good at all this summer, unfortunately.

Well, I did have one small epiphany, at least.  In trying to figure out what prize supplies I had, I realized that I had a small surplus of one thing.  I’ve been having an anime program for the last several months.  And every month when Operation Anime sends me my new DVD, they put a bunch of promotional postcards for different anime series in the envelope.  So okay, this summer every teen who reads one book will get to pick one of the anime postcards.  It’s not much, but it’s a start.