Re: Duplicate Book Sales

[Judy Turner <jat@mpm1.mpm.edu>]

While donors can certainly stipulate that a collection be kept together
as a collection, my response in these fiscally challenged times would be
to request an endowment, along with the items, to support such an 
undertaking.  

Keeping a collection intact is interesting from the point of view of
looking at the interests, tastes and connoiseurship of an individual
collector, and perhaps, as a reflection of the period of time in which the
person collected. But, can we really afford to build such monuments to
collectors given the finite resources of time, space and money available?

How many duplicates, or copies of inferior examples, or reprints or
subsequent editions does it make sense for us to process, catalog and
store, particularly if the main purpose is to honor a collector's wishes?

Question - when you agree to accept an entire collection and maintain it
as such, do you physically segregate such a collection from other
materials in your library or repository, much as an archival collection, or
do you integrate it with other materials on the subject?  We've tried both
approaches when we've accepted collections of scientific and scholarly
reprints from retiring curators and find pluses and minuses to both.

We do not accept donations for the purpose of selling them.  If memory
serves me correctly, IRS guidelines require that we keep the material for
at least three years and we just don't have that kind of space.  Our
collections policy requires that any funds generated by the sale of
library collections be used for library acquisitions.  We contact donors
and offer to return unwanted duplicates and out of scope material or
we request their okay to donate them to another local institution whose 
collection policy encompasses the subject matter. It's so much simpler
this way and seems to result in decent donor relations, so far at least.

Judy Turner
Director, Library and Archives
Milwaukee Public Museum