As the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, fought for extra funding for the city’s libraries last year, her campaign coffers swelled with tens of thousands of dollars in donations from trustees of the New York Public Library.

There is nothing illegal about the donations, which coincided with Ms. Quinn’s public efforts to secure an additional $42.7 million in the city’s budget to ensure city libraries could stay open at least six days a week. But the contributions illustrate the financial relationship that often springs up between the people who advocate for services and the elected officials who have the ability to deliver funding.

An initial wave of trustee contributions flowed into Ms. Quinn’s campaign during the months leading up to her public declaration that she would advocate for more funding for libraries during her budget negotiations with Mayor Bloomberg. A second wave of contributions hit her campaign in the summer, after she successfully negotiated the funding boost to pay for the additional service hours.

In the course of last year, Ms. Quinn’s campaign collected $43,542 from 22 library trustees, none of whom had ever before given her a political contribution. With public matching funds provided by taxpayer dollars, the total haul came to $61,392, according to donations listed in the city’s Campaign Finance Board database, which were analyzed by The New York Sun. Including funds raised by the chairwoman of the board from non-trustee donors active in supporting the library, the trustees delivered $69,592 to the Quinn campaign, a figure that includes matching funds. There are 60 trustees on the board, which, like several cultural organization boards in the city, includes the speaker of the City Council as an ex officio trustee.

A spokesman for Ms. Quinn, James McShane, disputed the notion that the contributions prompted the speaker to support additional library funding.

“To suggest that the donations from the board of the public library influenced Chris’ decision to fight for 6 day library service for our kids has got to be the dumbest, most asinine, most ludicrous idea in the history of journalism,” he wrote in an e-mail.

The City Council has been embroiled in a slush fund scandal for weeks, after it was disclosed that the council was hiding millions of dollars behind fictitious groups in the city’s budget. The U.S. attorney’s office and the Department of Investigation are examining the council’s spending habits.

The scandal has drawn attention to the council’s finances and the ties between outside organizations that receive city funding and the elected officials who help steer it there.

The influx of campaign contributions from library trustees began in January of last year, when the chairwoman of the library’s board, Catherine Marron, gave Ms. Quinn $4,950 for her likely mayoral campaign, the maximum contribution allowed for candidates seeking citywide office.

Ms. Quinn has raised more than $2.4 million for her campaign, according to the Campaign Finance Board’s most recent figures.

In February, five more trustees signed checks for Ms. Quinn, and the next month another 12 board members donated to her campaign.

On March 7, Ms. Quinn’s campaign took in $7,250 from 10 donors who passed their checks through Ms. Marron, who is listed as an intermediary on the city’s Campaign Finance Board database. Six of those donations came from individuals outside the board.

On April 5, Ms. Quinn called for keeping libraries open six full days a week and proposed spending an additional $43 million on the city’s library systems over three years to pay for the additional hours. She made the announcement during her official response to Mayor Bloomberg’s preliminary budget. For emphasis and to show that the additional library hours were a focus of her budget priorities, she delivered her speech at a library in Chinatown.

During budget negotiations in April, May and for the first stretch of June, no library trustees gave to her campaign.

On June 12, the mayor and Ms. Quinn reached a budget deal that included the funding she had sought for library service.

For the rest of the summer, with a budget settlement in place, the checks from library trustees resumed. Eleven trustees who had given Ms. Quinn money earlier in the year sent her another funding boost of $14,392. Three trustees who hadn’t given to her campaign handed over a combined $5,000. In December, the speaker collected two more checks from trustees. One was for $4,950 and the other for $500.

Ms. Marron, the chairwoman of the library, said in a statement: “Those of us who give our time to the Library do so because we care deeply about its mission and the millions of New Yorkers it reaches each year.”

“I support candidates who share my commitment to New York City and libraries. Speaker Quinn has fought throughout her career for opening library doors longer hours and providing more books and services for the New Yorkers who visited our libraries 16 million times in the last year,” she said.