One of my colleagues just brought me a bag 'o goodies from the exhibitor's hall. You wouldn't necessarily think of a library conference as a hotbed of anime and manga goodness but ... he said that this year there was most of one aisle devoted to just that! (and I pick this year not to go. Oh well, wait till June!)
Bear in mind that ALA is comparable in size to Anime Expo... maybe a tad bigger at between 12-15,000 people at the summer conference and a little smaller at the midwinter. That gives you a sense of the size of an aisle in the exhibitor's room. And allllllll of those librarians and the people who sell us computer systems, books, journal subscriptions, labels and furniture and the like are there, being exposed to this goodness.
My point? Talk to your librarians. There's a BIG and growing body of literature out there about how manga gets people reading. These people (especially at school and public libraries, and academic libraries that have leisure reading or popular culture collections) WANT stuff that gets us in there. If you ask for it, there's a good chance they'll buy it. We buy DVDs here, (I twist the arm of the guy who orders for film studies... *evil grin*) and I know a lot of other libraries do too. I suppose it also helps that a lot of the people who got into the field in the '70's are retiring and being replaced by much younger (or younger-at-heart) folks who are more interested in world culture and more familiar with animation.
It's growing!!
(As long as we don't tell them all about cel collecting...)
