Financial Literacy in Public Libraries: A Guide for Building Collections: Acknowledgements

We thank the Director of the American Library Association’s Office for Research and Evaluation, Kathy Rosa, and Research Coordinator Rachel Wedeward, MLIS, for assistance with research and methodology and for comments that greatly improved our result. We also thank Program Officer Kelsey Henke for her hard work on the ALA Personal Finance survey and for creating a report on those survey results.

We would also like to show our gratitude to the staff at ALA Library for sharing their pearls of wisdom with us during the course of this research, and to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for their insights and opportunity to visit. We are also immensely grateful to Lisa Liu from the Santa Clara County Public Library District for her comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Any errors are our own.

This guide was supported by funding from the FINRA Investor Education Foundation.

The following is guidance for librarians to follow when helping patrons with personal finance matters, as outlined in the webinar, Beyond the Basics of Personal Finance: Helping Library Patrons Help Themselves, presented by the American Library Association and the FINRA Investor Education Foundation[1]:

• Don’t log into patrons’ financial accounts.
• Don’t review patrons’ financial documents.
• Don’t make phone calls on patrons’ behalf.
• Do help patrons find and use resources.
• Do explain why you are following these guidelines.