Original posting followed by responses.
From: Paul Metz <pmetz_at_vt.edu>
Here at Virginia Tech we've noticed an increasing amount of overlap
between the books our generous friends want to give us and our
existing collections. Processing most gifts is no longer efficient,
and so we are thinking of switching from a posture of "sure, bring
'em, we'll find some keepers" to "we only want the keepers but we'll
have to work with you to identify them in advance." If we do this, I
anticipate that the donors of many of the 3,000+ books we've been
taking in annually will prefer to look elsewhere. As you all know,
often these are people breaking up a household or an office and
anxious to move fairly quickly.
Besides revising our policies to indicate this posture, being really
courteous but pretty firm about needing to see collections first, and
keeping a list of referrals (AAUW, others who conduct regular sales),
if anyone has tips, dos and don'ts etc they would like to share about
how to play this, please send them directly to me and I'll be glad to
summarize to the list. We are not able to be the interim depository
for books headed to the third world, so that's out. Thanks in advance
for any ideas.
---#1---
From:
"Kris Gerhard" <kgerhard_at_iastate.edu>
Iowa State University has a "fits in a box" rule that has worked well
for us. If someone has a donation they wish to make, and it fits in a
box (imagine your average sized box, large but not too large for
someone to carry without equipment), we will accept the donation and
sort through it for keepers and discards in-house. If the desired
donation does *not* fit in a box, we ask the would-be donor to have
the subject specialist for the collection to visit the collection in
situ and select which volumes s/he wants brought over to the library
for further assessment. The ones definitely not wanted are not brought
to the library. If an in situ evaluation is not possible, we are
willing to work from an inventory list (title/author/date if possible)
to winnow the donation down without bringing it over to the library.
Our official policy is that it is the donor's responsibility to create
a list of any collection that is to be reviewed, but in practice, many
are willing to have someone come visit their collection, and we don't
push the list requirement too hard. It's a narrow line between having
a reasonable policy that works for the library and the university
foundation, and discouraging donors. We do tell donors it is to their
advantage at tax time to have an actual list of what they donated.
Our acknowledgement of most gifts is just a volume count.
Kristin H. Gerhard
Associate Dean for Collections and Technical Services
203 Parks Library
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011
vox 515/294-7511
fax 515/294-2112
email kgerhard_at_iastate.edu
"When you learn not to want things so badly, life comes to you."
Jessica Lange
---#2---
Subject: unwanted gifts
From: Paul Metz <pmetz_at_vt.edu>
In response to my posting about how to fend off unwanted books, I
received seven helpful and much appreciated replies. A couple
mentioned the political sensitivities that make it impossible
sometimes to say no (as, to a prospective donor). A couple noted that
it's time-consuming to visit donors' houses. Nearly all said they had
become much more restrictive, to the point where they now usually
require an advance listing of the proposed gifts. Here for example are
the notes from Karen Marshall at UVa and Swarthmore's Amy McColl.
We'll be moving in this direction ourselves. Thanks, all! -Paul Metz
University of Virginia:
Hi Paul. At UVA we came to the same conclusions as you have. See our
gifts policy on our web page at:
http://www.lib.virginia.edu/policies/giftpol.html
We of course make exceptions as necessary, but typically we ask to see
a list of the books being offered and have the list reviewed by the
appropriate subject librarian and/or special collections librarian.
Normally we have no problem explaining that we already have most of
the titles listed and then we pass on our list of referrals. We will
also go out to people's houses to assess collections in special
situations.
Swarthmore:
Hi Paul,
Even though we don't get anywhere close to the numbers of gift books
that you do, we instituted a policy a couple of years ago which
indicates that potential donors have to provide us with a detailed
list of the books for us to review before carting the boxes in. We do
make exceptions for donations under 5 books, but our policy (which we
give to the donor) clearly states that they need to provide us with
the list if there are 5 or more titles. We then have student workers
search the titles in our database to find dups, and then
bibliographers make final decisions on what to accept or decline.
It's up to the donor to weed out the ones we want and bring them in.
We found that we were spending enormous amounts of staff time on these
books, many of which we already owned, and in this way we head off a
lot of potential unwanted donations. We decided that this policy
wouldn't discourage donations of expensive rare books, since they
would fall under the "5 book" rule in almost all cases.
Paul Metz, Director of Collection Management
University Libraries -- Virginia Tech
P.O. Box 90001 / Blacksburg VA / 24062-9001
Ph: (540) 231-5663 FAX: (540) 231-3694 e-mail: pmetz_at_vt.edu
---#3---
From: John Abbott <abbottjp_at_appstate.edu>
From time to time I see gift policies which state, we take no gifts.
Most recently, I ran into this one; note the second line:
http://www.library.arizona.edu/library/teams/irdp/giftpolicy.htm
In my fantasy library, on the loading dock would be a giant scale.
Donors would put their donation on one side and then load the
other side with belgian chocolate, german beer, &/or french wine
until the weights were equal, then we would accept the gift.
Received on Fri Dec 05 2003 - 17:17:15 EST