Are there such arbitrary restrictions on budget spending by public libraries (in which states, or is that a federal thing)? I can accept that public libraries might be somewhat underfunded, and choose to not advertise -- but it sounds strange that they are somehow forbidden to do so? (At least here in Norway most of the public libraries does quite a lot of advertising -- it's hard to imagine any service remaining visible if it's banned from marketing...).
I believe (from second-hand sources) that many libraries in the US are required by their funders (state and municipal governments) to spend a certain fraction of their budgets on buying books.
Well, that doesn't sound too crazy ("you need to spend some part of your budget on actually being a library") -- but that shouldn't exclude all marketing -- unless that fraction is very high indeed...?
