Gifts

[deborah]

All,
Just wondering how you handle gifts from retiring faculty and the
community at large. We host an annual book sale and quite a number
of those titles are selected for that. What criteria do you use for
selecting gifts for your collection?
Deborah Curry
Coordinator, Acquisitions and Collection Development
Oswego State University, SUNY

[David Vess]

Hi Deborah

I recently helped our gifts coordinator organize this material on her
website. (She's left since then)

Note the side bar item, Policy and then the info organized by
audience: donors, librarians, campus donors.

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/administration/collections/gifts/

best, david vess
UIUC Library

[Jenica Rogers-Urbanek]

Deb,

We try to handle gifts under the same criteria we use for any other
monograph - if we would buy it, we will add it to our collection. All
other materials we dispose of at our discretion. We've recently
clarified and codified our policy about what we do with gifts that are
not added to the collection, and donors now have a form to sign that
indicates they understand we have the right to do whatever we deem
appropriate with their donation. Those options include add to
collection, sell to students, sell to book dealers, send off to Better
World Books, or simply recycle if that's what's warranted.

Of course, that's the perfect world scenario. We do sometimes feel
moved to accept gifts into the collection that we otherwise would not,
depending on the nature of the donor and the importance of that donor to
the college. Relationship-building sometimes has to trump policy.

Jenica.

--

Jenica P. Rogers-Urbanek
Collection Development Coordinator and Technical Services Librarian
College Libraries, SUNY Potsdam
44 Pierrepont Avenue, Potsdam, NY 13676
(315) 267-3328, (315) 267-2744 (fax)

http://www2.potsdam.edu/rogersjp

"When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep." -- Ursula K. LeGuin.

[Jenica Rogers-Urbanek]

Oh, one more thing. I often steer retiring faculty to our local used
book store owner, because I have learned, after accepting many large
gifts from retiring faculty, that those collections are often a) very
dated and b) largely held by our library already. Due to the high level
of involvement faculty have historically had in our collection building,
most of the books deemed excellent enough for the faculty member to buy
were also recommended for library purchase... so in the end, we have a
large workload to process the gift with a small return for the library.
So I've begun trying to find alternate homes for these collections,
other than us. I've found that more often than not, the donors aren't
attached to the idea of their books going to the library as much as they
want their books to go somewhere that they'll be appreciated, and most
potential donors have been grateful for the options I've offered.

jenica.

--

[Alexis]

We review for inclusion based on the following (which I think is
fairly standard): do we own it already and if so, what is the
ciruclation and then the age of the item. Many times we have more
current or less current items, however, if it isn't the most current
edition, I generally do not add. And, if it's a textbook currently in
use, it doesn't get added.

My current library doesn't do a book sale, but at my previous library,
we did put items not included in the collection in the book sale.

Alexis

On Apr 21, 2:53 pm, "Jenica Rogers-Urbanek" <roger...@potsdam.edu>
wrote: