When Donations Go Bad

[Apologies for the two-month delay. I've been consumed by severe morning sickness (yep, I pregnant) and, well, writing a blog entry when I get home has been difficult. Please forgive the absence - I'm finally feeling better. Okay, onward!]

I feel like I've said this before, but it probably needs to be repeated: donations are both a blessing and a curse. I know, I know, some of you are thinking how ungrateful can this librarian be? It's a donation for god's sake!

Well, here's why:

We have very limited space here. I've said it a thousand times and it's still true. I ask that any time someone has a donation that they please, please complete a donation form listing the books and materials. I don't ask this because I'm mean and like to see people take on additional work when they're trying to move/downsize/whatever; it's because it helps me tell them what we actually need before they go to the effort of getting the boxes here. Rarely, do people follow this direction. Rarely. Like one in one hundred.

"I don't have time." "I already boxed them up." Okay fine. Then I have to tell them that whatever we don't need, we are going to sell. If they don't agree, I ask them to consider another location for their donation. People just cannot understand this and get furious. They've already had two strikes: please fill out the form - no! (strike one); I can take them all if you'll let me sell what we can't use - no! (strike two). There's no strike three in this situation because I can't take the books under these circumstances.

Most of the time, people just want to get rid of the books and really don't care what happens to them. So, I end up taking them all. Taking them all requires a lot of work: I have to make arrangements to get them (really a struggle because we have one delivery person for the entire museum) or have them delivered here. Once they're brought here, they're delivered to the library - all umpteen boxes - right by the front door (it's literally the only place), so I have to deal with them straightaway to get the boxes out of sight. We have to inventory the contents of the donations for the donor's tax purposes. This can days or weeks depending on how many books come in, because - guess what? - I do have other work to do. Then we have to compare the inventory list against our catalogue to see what we need and don't need.

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have spent days preparing an inventory and days searching the catalogue to see if we have the book or not, and then find that we already have everything that's been given. We have them all. They're all duplicates. We actually didn't need any of it and now, I've got to deal with it.

Here's a recent example that was especially unpleasant: a donor calls one of our libraries and the librarian there tells her, based on what the donor's told her about the donation, that she doesn't have a need for these books. The donor will not take no for an answer and calls me - at the other library who is part of the same library system and will be searching the same catalogue the other librarian searched - and demands that I take them. I cowed, I knew this person was a VIP and, dammit, we're all worried about losing our jobs and I don't want to rock the boat, so I say I'll take them. I know, I know.

Getting the books here was a nightmare. The donor had vacated the residence and everything was now being handled by a third party who called me on a daily basis to see if I was coming to pick up the books. I reminded and reminded the delivery person, but he's only one person too, and the books did not get picked up in a timely manner - and I heard about it. Why couldn't they just bring them to me? Well, because they don't do stuff like that. They're "donating" it to me; it's my responsibility.

Okay, so now I've been told I have to take several hundred books I don't want, I've been harassed and yelled at by this third party, but we finally have the books. Like the example above, this was another case where of the days and days it took to inventory and check for duplicates, only a handful of the three hundred books were things we actually needed. The rest were duplicates as the earlier librarian had already determined.

And now for the best part of this story... as we are getting to the end of the inventory one of my volunteers realizes something funny in a couple of the books: little black dots near the binding. Guess what it was. Psocids, or book lice! Not only was this donation tons of work and tons of staff and volunteer time, it now had potentially contaminated part of the library. We had to go through all of the books - one more painful time - and pull any others with this "issue", wrap them and throw them in the garbage.

Even though the intent of most donations comes from a warm-hearted place, it's important to remember: They're work, they're lots of time, they take up space and can sometimes go very bad.

I'd love to hear your donation horror stories!!