Optimizing Library Services-Donations to Libraries:An Ancient Problem Perfiguring Today's Access to Electronic Resources?

摘要

Arguably the key difference between the library of the past (before the age of Dewey and the founding of the American Library Association) and the library in the age of modern librarianship (1870s to date) is not any of the exciting issues such as library design, reader access to holdings, assistance to readers, retrieval and metadata, or automation. It is the status of book donations. The author's chapter in an IGI Global book "Collaboration in International and Comparative Librarianship" (Chakraborty and Das, 2014) discussed book donations to libraries in developing countries. Maybe, however, the lines of argument offered in that chapter can also offer something helpful to libraries in the electronic information age wherever they are in the world. These arguments need a little historical context.