Do you love libraries? Are you philanthropic or just want to support? How about funding a Kickstarter or Indiegogo library project? These projects have a multiple donation levels to accommodate whatever one can afford. Libraries are contending with increasingly constrained budgets, funding, and staffing shortages, as well as aging infrastructure. These funding platforms offer another avenue for libraries to use to fund their creative, educational and infrastructure projects with your help.

On Kickstarter you could help fund: 

LIBRARY FOR ALL: a digital library for the developing world

Unlocking knowledge to those living in poverty by providing access to ebooks and other digital content in low bandwidth communities. Library For All was founded for those who have little or no access to books in developing countries.

When Rebecca McDonald moved to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, she wasn’t a career humanitarian. Her most recent job was overseeing construction projects for Australia’s Department of Public Works. But while construction management might seem a useful set of skills in a country where so much had been destroyed, McDonald was moved by something else.

“Most schools have less than 30 books and these books are so precious they are not allowed to leave the school. Imagine if the entire span of knowledge available to you was just 30 books!” she wrote on her blog.

Meanwhile, she had access to all the world’s knowledge on her Kindle. It was the seed for the charitable project for which she is now fundraising on Kickstarter: Library for All. Via Creating A Digital Library For Bookless Students | FactCompany.

On Indiegogo you could help fund:

Park Slope North – Helen Owen Carey – Child Development Center Library Project

The Park Slope North (Helen Owen Carey) Child Development Center (PSN-CDC) is a nonprofit preschool serving the needs of families from a diverse range of socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds in Brooklyn and beyond, with funding provided by the Administration for Children’s Services supporting approximately 50 percent of the student body.

This year, the Parents’ Advisory Committee (PAC), in conjunction with the center’s new director, are creating a new library and multipurpose space. Teachers and students will use the new library for literacy-based and dramatic activities in addition to housing the school’s ever-growing collection of children’s books.

Libraries, librarians and stakeholders can come up with unique funding project ideas such as Peter Brantley’s suggestion for a new library publication:

Shelf-talkers: Kickstarting a new library journal | PWxyz Blog

It’s time for librarians to develop our own journalism. The basis of the American Library Association – individual membership vs. institutional affiliation – evidences the affinity for an in-community approach. A new library publication – call it Shelf Talkers – could be supported through librarian subscriptions, rather than vendor dollars, to assure complete editorial independence, lowering the risks of special interests. 

Shelf Talkers – or whatever we wanted to call it – could run with an editor-in-chief, an operations manager, and a small cadre of staff reporters. Additional contributors from the library world – one of the most literate and expressive communities around – could fill out a publication which need not worry itself with “issues” or “volumes” or printed matter. Its reach would be global, as would its contribution base – an inherent advantage of a networked publication.