GIFTS & EXCHANGE
The Gifts and Exchange unit (G & E) is part of the Acquisition and Licensing Department . We are located in rooms 415 & 417 of the Smathers Library ( Library East). Under the direction of three staff - Steven Carrico, Associate Librarian, Raimonda Margjoni, Archivist, and David Allerton, Senior LTA - the unit oversees incoming gift material and manages a large exchange program. The G & E unit also runs the Smathers Library Bookstore. For more information on gifts, exchanges, and the bookstore, please click on one of the following links.
The gifts program is responsible for accepting, distributing, and routing a large amount and variety of gift materials donated to the Smathers libraries. During FY 2004/05, G & E accepted and processed over 8,000 monographs and 3,000 serials, from which about 3,000 monographs and over 1,000 serials were cataloged and added to library collections. The remaining items were donated to other libraries, sent to the Smathers Library Bookstore for sale, or discarded altogether.
As stated in the libraries' Policy for Gifts of Materials, “gifts offer an unusually important opportunity to broaden, enrich, and rebuild its collections. The George A. Smathers Libraries encourage and welcome offers of gifts.” In a time of inflated publishing costs and tightened state budgets for higher education, gifts are very important to the libraries' collection development policy and the libraries' mission as an academic research institution. Library staff take an active role in this development effort and follow procedures for handling gifts.
The exchange program of the University of Florida Smathers Libraries is one of the largest and most successful programs in the United States and has been an ongoing program for over 50 years.The exchange program operates on a barter system; by trading research publications with over 600 partner libraries, institutions, academies, and museums around the world, the University of Florida Libraries recurrently receives over 1,000 serial and monograph series titles. The serial titles and monographs received from UF exchange partners are often hard-to-find publications that significantly bolster collections in the libraries. The collections that most benefit from the Smathers Libraries' exchange program are the Marston Science Library, Architecture and Fine Arts Library, and the Latin American Collection.
During the past few years, the program has grown by encompassing important agricultural research materials previously received from the now defunct IFAS exchange program, and through the receipt of exhibition catalogues from art museums and libraries in collaboration with the University of Florida Harn Museum .
For years the University of Florida Smathers Libraries held its Annual Book Sale on the colonnade outside Library West. The sales were popular events and generated revenue for the library's new books fund. However, too often people of the UF community missed the one-day sales; and, the book sales were extremely labor intensive for the library staff to coordinate.
To better serve our library patrons and to decrease the amount of labor and space required to hold huge outdoor book sales, the Smathers Library Bookstore was opened in August 1999 on the first floor of Library East. As with the book sales, the materials sold in the bookstore are gift items that go unselected for library holdings. Items not selected for library collections are usually either titles already owned by the libraries, or are items deemed inappropriate for the holdings of a large academic research institution. All donors are informed at the time of their donations that unselected gifts will be made available for sale in the Smathers Library Bookstore. In special cases, library books and materials withdrawn from the collections are sold in the bookstore. The Smathers Libraries use the profits generated by the bookstore to purchase new books and other materials for library collections.
