The Civic Education Project recently completed a study of the effectiveness of U.S. book and journal donations to the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe, based on 700 surveys of librarians, faculty members, and university officials, plus a large number of interviews with donor organizations. Following are some of the key points from the Executive Summary.

• In general the need for such donations is great throughout the region.  Over 70 percent of faculty members surveyed claimed they did not have "reasonable" access to "essential" foreign journals.
• Book and journal donations are reaching readers in Eastern Europe.  One-third of the librarians surveyed stated that more than 75 percent of the Western books acquired in the past two years were donations.
• Despite the efforts of donor organizations, broad access to donated books remains a widespread problem.  "Searches conducted by CEP for donated books and journals [found that]...in the majority of cases, less than 30 percent of the donated books are broadly accessible to the reading public. Diversion, poor cataloguing, 'warehousing' of donations by libraries and severely restrictive conditions for access to donated materials are disturbingly widespread."
• Quantity of books donated too often outstrips quality.

Editor's note:  Groups seeking to provide Christian literature to new seminary and Bible institute libraries and existing public and university libraries would do well to carefully consider the findings of the CEP survey.

Copies of the Executive Summary of the report and the entire report itself exist on-line.
The URL for the Executive Summary (9Kb) is ftp://capstan.cis.yale.edu/pub/civic-education/book-donations-report/00_Summary.txt.  The URL for the full text of the report (108Kb) is ftp://capstan.cis.yale.edu/pub/civic-education/book-donations-report/Book_Donations.txt.  Copies of the report which can be printed in Macintosh or Windows format also exist in the Civic Education FTP Directory.  For more information contact:  Civic Education Project, Box 205445 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520-5445; tel:  203-781-0263; fax:  203-781-0265; e-mail:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. 

 "Western Book Donation Programs Effective, But Need Improvement" East-West Church & Ministry Report, 3 (Spring 1995), 7.

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© 1995 East-West Church and Ministry Report
ISSN 1069-5664