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It is imperative that every library have a financial plan. The library cannot be managed properly without one, especially if values, not expedience, are to determine priorities. The authors review the basics and then carefully outline how best to create a financial plan that will involve staff, internal and external stakeholders, and maintain or improve services.

Though libraries and businesses may differ in their ultimate objectives, libraries can benefit from adapting some business practices to suit their environments. This article describes library values which bring uniqueness to the library as an institution, and details ways in which libraries can adopt and benefit from three current business trends: creating organizations in which innovation can flourish, creating organizations that prepare and live by strategic plans, and creating organizations that participate in the national political arena.

Few issues in recent times have so provoked debate and dissention within the library field as has the concept of fees for user services. The issue has aroused the passions of our profession precisely because its roots and implications extend far beyond the confines of just one service discipline. Its reflection is mirrored in national debates about the proper spheres of the public and private sectors—in matters of information generation and distribution, certainly, but in a host of other social ramifications as well, amounting virtually to a debate about the most basic values which we have long assumed to constitute the very framework of our democratic and humanistic society.