Winning Grants: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians with Multimedia Tutorials and Grant Development Tools

Abstract

In these days of economic austerity, when librarians find themselves facing the quadruple whammy of declining library budgets; pressures to innovate and stay relevant in the world of social media and Library 2.0; continuing demand for existing services by a down-on-its luck, needier patron base; and pressures by administrators or local officials to make libraries as financially self-sufficient as possible, a how-to manual on landing grants has a ready market. The book Winning Grants: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians with Multimedia Tutorials and Grant Development Tools is the ideal book for our times. The book lives up to its title, being comprehensive in scope, taking the reader through every conceivable step in the grants process from making the commitment and understanding the grant process (and anyone who has ever worked on even a small-scale, grant-funded project knows how much time goes into every step of one) to actually applying for a grant, to implementing and overseeing the project, to understanding and complying with the grantor's reporting requirements. Indeed, it is hard to spot any aspect of the science and art of grant writing that the authors do not address and in an admirably approachable fashion throughout. Chapter 10, “Top 10 Tips for Grant Success,” is a particularly useful chapter that includes such themes as people, planning, priorities, purpose, pursuit, and so on. The authors make the point that funders need to be persuaded that a proposed project meets a real need in the community and is in line with the funder's own goals. This is an obvious point, but one that the authors rightly maintain is often ignored by librarians who end up proposing an ill-conceived project to a grantor with little history of funding or known enthusiasm for the type of project being pitched. Those entirely new to the grant-writing process may be thinking, “Well, I have heard about grants, but what sorts of projects could our library possibly get funding for?” This is particularly relevant to medical librarians, given that so much of the grant funding for library projects and so many news stories about the results of such projects tend to be about public, school, or academic libraries. Chapter 11, “Library Success Stories,” is a heartening one that provides detailed, readable, helpfully illustrated examples of real-world grant projects, such as purchasing and installing library signage; providing outreach to senior citizens in Los Alamos, New Mexico, using a grant from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, South Central Region; and strengthening a public library's services to the transgender community. One especially useful feature of each of the highlighted examples is the answer in each case to the question, “What would you do differently?” It is a pleasure to page through a handsome, well-designed volume that lives up to its name. This really is a how-to-do-it manual with something useful on virtually every page. The worksheets and other illustrative materials (e.g., sample project action steps, sample project timeline) are outstanding and will especially aid novice grant applicants as they try to persuade wary colleagues that seeking grant funding is worth the time and effort and is a gamble (for there are no guarantees that even the most worthwhile projects will get funded) worth taking. Even at the relatively steep price of $99.95, this book is a steal.