My instinct is to resist these types of invitations, but (to quote the old New York State Lottery slogan) hey, you never know. We certainly don't want to accumulate massive numbers of duplicates that become _our_ problem (or Gifts and Exchanges' problem), instead of the donor's. On the other hand, if donors can provide lists that we can select from, that is helpful. (One of the first questions I ask, when offered a book donation, is, May we be selective?)
Or, if we have a sense that the donor had intellectual interests that might result in significant additions to our research collections, by all means let's pursue the matter. My favorite example involved the library of a deceased scholar of Hungarian Jewry, whose books on the subject greatly enriched the holdings of the YIVO Library. I enjoyed meeting and chatting with the late scholar's widow (an artist) as well. And sometimes one encounters unexpected -- and welcome -- surprises. A couple of years ago an acquaintance invited me to look over her father's books. He had died a year or so earlier and the daughter was cleaning out his house. I went there with not very high expectations and indeed the Judaica books on the living-room shelves were fairly slim pickings. But then I went into the garage and encountered a treasure trove of "gray literature": vintage publications -- in Hebrew and English -- devoted to soil science, agricultural development, and water resources in Israel in the 1950s and early 1960s. This is precisely the sort of special collections material that we are collecting at Stanford. The 1950s-era Israeli children's magazines were a bonus. (My acquaintance's father had trained as a soil scientist and lived with his family on an Israeli kibbutz back then.) Hey, you never know... Zachary M. Baker Reinhard Family Curator of Judaica and Hebraica Collections Stanford University
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