New funding approach--making corporate sponsors fight over Harry Potter and Winnie-the-Pooh?

A snippet from an article dealing with fundraising as a means to keep budget-crunched libraries operating indicates that some libraries are asking for sponsors out in the community. I generally hate seeing corporate logos everywhere, but hey, it's really a great idea. Open it up for bidding. I mean, if you could get your bookplate in the Harry Potter books, you'd get far more advertisement than, say, War and Peace (and no, I'm not knocking Tolstoy or the quality of either book--just saying that in terms on quantity, HP probably has it beat). But ideally you could get someone to sponsor a character and then apply it equally throughout the library--that way you wouldn't be faced with the idea of 'selling out'.

I also like how the article points out that if they were in the private sector, the worth of libraries is such that they in the old dot com days they'd get all sorts of perks. They've apparently been working overboard, possibly due to the burst of the dot com bubble, but personally I think it has more to do with the explosion of the information age in general. But it's nice to see that some people are taking notice.