The purpose of this paper is to examine how finances in an academic library might differ from household finances; in particular, how a library budget might be unbalanced throughout a fiscal year.
The author compares typical library resources to representative groceries purchased for a home and assess the relative nutritional value of each.
The author concludes that using a library‐style budget is likely to result in a less interesting diet, but such a budget is, with planning, adequate to sustain a minimum level of health. In future columns the author plans to examine ways a library budget might be altered in order to move beyond adequacy to higher performance levels.
The approach should be worthy of note for administrators who struggle with the “use it or lose it” philosophy common in libraries.
