[Sca-cooks] books (and libraries)

[Jadwiga Zajaczkowa / Jenne Heise]

> Be careful who you give a book to!  They may not be putting it out for 
> others, unless it is to make a few dollars in the library booksale.....

In general, before donating books to a library, give them a call, and/or 
contact their 'aquisitions' or 'gifts' person, to see if they want the 
book for their collection. Public libraries generally have to be fairly 
selective in what older books they keep; too many people are turned off 
by seeing 'a bunch of old books'. Academic libraries generally only 
collect in areas that their university faculty are interested in. Most 
libraries I know have a 'space crisis,' where there isn't enough space 
to shelve all the books if they came back at once, let alone bound 
journals/magazines as they come in.

So, the trick is to find a library that has a collection that fits what 
you want to donate. Otherwise, you're better off selling the books and 
giving the money to the library. I've given money to the public library 
near me to buy specific good books, with their permission, and they've 
done so. The library I work at goes through the books and journals that 
come in as donations and picks out what would go to our collection 
(well, we've got a massive theology and Methodist history collection, 
and people tend to give us related works), then puts the other books out 
on the 'take what you want for free' cart. We just had to get rid of 
some issues of _Early Music_ journal-- we are so cramped for space for 
journals that we've had to give up keeping print issues that we can get 
through the electronic journal consortium JSTOR. 

-- 
-- Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, Knowledge Pika jenne at fiedlerfamily.net 
"America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on 
imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand." 
	-- Harry S. Truman