The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited.

    Santa Fe (N.M.) Public Library (SFPL) makes use of gift books--big time. Last year, 31.3 percent of the circulation of adult books at the main library consisted of donated items that had been added to the collection. This surprising statistic is the fruit of a systematic effort. We try to recognize, and add to the collection, additional copies of titles in demand that the library can't afford to buy in the quantities needed. We watch for titles we are happy to have but might not buy before buying other things. We fish them out of the gift books.
    The late Marvin Scilkin, a frequent advocate for taking advantage of gifts, observed that his own local library automatically passed all gifts on to its book sale.(FN1) If you search the professional literature, you find articles that emphasize how to say no to what you don't want but scarcely anything written from the point of view of the many public librarians who energetically use donated books. Throwing the question out to the public librarians' electronic discussion list immediately elicited positive testimony from librarians all over the country: they're just not writing articles about using gifts.(FN2)
    SFPL gets a lot of useful donations. Systemwide, the library collection has 157,420 titles; 27,895 titles, 17.7 percent of the total, have at least one donated copy attached. Of these, 14,039 titles have only donated copies. Whether because all purchased copies have been lost, or because the title entered the collection as a gift, 8.9 percent of all SFPL titles are in the collection because our patrons donated them.
    SFPL is a not a large library system. There is a main library, one full-service branch (the Oliver La Farge Branch Library), and a minibranch in a shopping mall (the Library Bookstop). The numbers appearing in this article are minuscule compared to other places. The library system's total circulation was 545,000 last year.
    In 1998 the library system added 25,157 items. Of those, 8,607 (34.2 percent) were donations, which included children's books, music CDs, and videos. These gifts were added to the collection throughout the system. However, more than half of the gift items added (4,605) went into the main library adult circulating collection, simply because most of the donations are books for adults, and most are donated at the main library.
    I don't mean to suggest that the proportion of good stuff to the unusable in the gifts is any higher here at SFPL than elsewhere. (There's no need to tell horror stories. Everyone is familiar with the moldy, the crumbling, the accidentally accepted truckload of ancient discards from an unnamed federal agency.) We encourage the flow of gifts, make sure our patrons know how much we appreciate and use them, take what we need, and process them with the help of volunteers. Then we are able to channel the rest of the river of gifts on to the Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library. The whole operation depends on backup received from the Friends. From the thousands of useful books donated by our public that end up in the collection every year, to the volunteer and Friends of the Library time and labor that make it possible for the library to use them, our gift books represent community support on a grand scale.

TOSSING GIFT BOOKS AROUND
    People bring us books: a few, a paper sackful, a couple of boxes, a pick-up truck load. They leave them in the book drop, or outside the back door, or at the desk; they ask for someone to come with a truck to fetch them away. (The Friends do it.) A corner of the acquisitions delivery area is devoted to these gifts. As the Friends describe it in their newsletter, "After the books are brought to the library, the librarians choose the ones they want to add to the library's inventory. Next, books are selected for the book store, and finally from those remaining come the choices for the spring and fall book sales."(FN3)
    The initial partition is entirely intuitive and a surprisingly physical job. Here's how it works at the main library. As often as the gifts threaten to overflow their side of the acquisitions receiving area, I go down to the basement with an empty book truck (or two) and rummage rapidly through the boxes, piles, bags, and shelves. Things we might need go on the book truck to be checked in the catalog: one or two or five from each box; sometimes more, sometimes none at all. The immediate goal is to clear enough of the floor to make room for more to arrive. In an ordinary week at the main library, it might take two or three sessions of sorting in the gift book area, totaling from two to five hours a week, to keep the area in passable shape.
    Whoever does this first sorting must bring to the process a librarian's "book radar": knowledge of what people are looking for, placing on hold, requesting that the library buy; what is missing when we do a shelf check; which areas of the stacks look most catastrophically picked over, etc. In all three libraries the people sorting the gift books occupy professional positions (whether or not they have an MLS), but book radar and awareness of the collection are the defining requirements.
    Selecting from the gifts is a regular assignment in the sense that it's part of somebody's job and has to get done. It's irregular in that it is something attended to as time permits, or when it has suddenly become high priority because unsorted gifts are overflowing into the hallway, or when too many book trucks are overloaded with potential treasures waiting to be checked.
    Everything the library doesn't want gets boxed up and shoved or carried across to the Friends of the Library's catchment area, a 4' × 7' space outlined on the floor with tape. It's an almost subconscious process, a rapid mental mumble of "No no no no yes no no maybe no YES! (eighteen holds on this one; run it up to the hold person's desk to be added right now)." At the end of the session I'm hot and dusty, my hands are filthy, there's not room to pile another box in the Friend's area--and, if I'm lucky, the floor is more or less clear in the gift area. The book truck of potentially useful gifts now waits to be examined from the point of view of collection development. This next part of the process tends to happen in spare crannies of time--when it's quiet at the reference desk, while waiting for a meeting--so it is hard to say how much time it requires.

THANKS TO THE FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY
    No library staff member has to give another thought, or another minute of the library's time, to unwanted gift books. The Friends of the Library's volunteers take over at that point, knowledgeably converting as much of the flow as possible into money from their store or their big semiannual sales--money that they give back to the library in funding support for acquisitions, staff training, snacks for tutoring programs, buses to bring school classes to the library, etc. The Friends of the Library's volunteers dispose of the books that are left over after the sales. This year's unsold books went, among other places, to the community library in a nearby subdivision, the Friends of the Library of a neighboring town, several schools, and a thrift store.(FN4)
    What proportion of the gift flow gets added to the collection systemwide? Those statistics have never been kept. One reason is that it is too much trouble. The circulating main library adult collection consists of 90,935 items at the moment, of which 23,273 were donated. I tried to guestimate how many titles get selected from all those donated.
    On a recent afternoon I filled about five shelves of a book truck with items to look at more closely for possible addition to the collection, and shoved about fifteen boxes of what the library didn't want over to the Friends. After checking the books on the truck against the catalog, I moved maybe 15 or 20 percent of them to the additional copy (add-on) or to-be-cataloged shelves in technical services, and set aside an armload of items the branches might need. The rest of what was on the truck also went to the Friends, another two or three boxes. Do we keep as much as five or ten percent of what's donated, to put in the collection? Maybe. Only maybe. Yet, to repeat the circulation number at the beginning of this article, nearly a third of the books adults checked out at the main library last year came from that 5 percent, accumulating year after year; and the library can afford to "acquire" those items because the Friends of the Library take care of--sell or give away--the other 90 or 95 percent.
    We explain to each donor that not all gifts go directly into the collection, but that, since the Friends put the items not selected into the book sale, the library benefits either way. The gift material receipt which donors are given on request says the same thing, more formally: "Your gift will enrich the Santa Fe Public Library in one of two ways. When your gift book falls within the scope of the Materials Selection Policy of the Santa Fe Public Library and does not duplicate items already owned, it will be added to the library's collection, and ... if a book is not selected by the library's staff, it will then be sold in the Friends' Bookstore or annual book sale. Funds from the sale of gift books are used to support library activities...."
    Occasionally, a donor will ask for a commitment that the library definitely shelve their books, and we usually decline the gift. Once in a great while a donor will ask, after the fact, why a particular item or box of items they had donated was not chosen. Most of the time, however, those donors who ask about the process are satisfied, and a little surprised, to hear how large a proportion of the library's collection is made up of donated items, and how heavily they circulate.

AND TO OTHER VOLUNTEERS
    Processing also is supported, in part, by volunteer labor. All donated titles which need to be cataloged are sent to technical services, where a long-time volunteer does the physical processing--tape, mylar covers, rubber stamps, labels--and another searches OCLC and downloads a possibly appropriate bibliographic record into the catalog. From there, the books, each with its bibliographic printout, go first to a cataloger and then to a clerk for completion of the process.
    Donated items that are added copies for existing bibliographic records are processed differently at each location. At the smaller branch, the Library Bookstop, another long-time volunteer does all the processing, including attaching the new item to the bibliographic record. At the Oliver La Farge Branch, the circulation department does all the work for the added copies. At the main library, the bulk of the add-ons is processed by a volunteer in technical services, and a technician finishes the job of adding them to the database.
    At the main library, a certain number of the add-ons are done by the circulation department before the books even get to the gift area in the basement. Some of the circulation staff's collateral tasks include working at the information desk; processing the suggestions-for-purchase that come from the public, and processing the holds on items that patrons didn't find on the shelves. The circulation department staff knows very well what our patrons want. They are likely to spot, and process themselves, a copy of Harold Bloom's Shakespeare book that is in high demand, for example, or Oprah's latest choice, or a pregnancy title whose last copy we've unaccountably lost.

SELECTION AS PICKING WILDFLOWERS
    The library's official selectors work from reviews, journals, and lists without seeing the books. Selectors have to consider at all times what they do or don't have enough money to buy. They have to consider each potential acquisition and ask, "Do we need this? Do we need it as badly as we need to spend the money on something else?"
    The gift books, on the other hand, are more like wildflowers. You can only pick what has happened to appear. What "happens" is not random, of course. Actually it quite usefully reflects the community's reading interests. The books themselves are their own set of clues about what people want. Does an unfamiliar author turn up twice within a week among the gift books? Better check the catalog and see if we have any of her titles. Every third or fourth time someone gives us Shakti Gawain's Living in the Light (New World Library 1986), it's time to make sure we have sufficient copies in decent condition. It still circulates a lot. Is there a nonscruffy copy left on the shelf?
    The titles that people want most often, that they use and lose, and steal and wear out, and we can't keep enough copies available, are the same titles they also buy and later donate. One moment we have enough Stephen King (or Shakti Gawain), and a few months or a year later there don't seem to be very many around any more. Luckily, the patrons keep donating more copies.
    This is not something the selectors can count on. Realistically, what comes in through the gifts is too happenstance, and the library's ability to make use of what comes depends too much on the gift book workers' available time for looking closely at the donated books (and whether their intuition is in gear when they put their hands on them). We don't actively solicit gifts or post want lists.
    The donated books themselves, the items in hand, control the process. This is a return to a different, more tactile relationship. Does the book look useful, is it in demand, is it in good shape? We don't need to ask, "Can we afford it?", but only, "Can we use it?"
    Everyone who works with the gift books loves the task. You get to hold, enjoy, admire, choose. You get the pleasure of seeing the patrons' generosity and the sometimes unexpected things they give us. Wonderful, charming books turn up and are popped into the collection. Other wonderful books come to hand that are gorgeous but not needed; books too old, too fragile, too eccentric, too silly for the library. These get set aside on this pile or that for a while, because it's a pity to let them go; then eventually they go to the Friends. The size of the budget doesn't weigh in the decision process at all, only the books themselves, and what our users may need.

SHELF ROOM
    The limiting factor is not money but space. The branches have long since run out of shelf space, and for years have had to weed as fast as they add. In the last couple of years space has become a factor at the main library as well. At one time, we would have automatically added a second copy of almost anything, just to make sure there'd be one on the shelf for the next person who sought it, or one left in the system if natural attrition wiped out the first copy; but no longer.
    As selectors at main or the branches sort through the gifts, they keep an eye on what the other locations may lack and regularly send each other boxes full of selections. Any title the branches feel the system needs but they can't make room for, they send to main. Popular authors, useful nonfiction, titles of local interest that the main library has but the branches don't, are sent in the other direction.
    If selection choices could be made with impeccable accuracy, the shelves would not get more crowded because the copies added would match the "browsing demand."(FN5) We do our best to weigh need against the crowding of the shelves. Still, it's very tempting, if all four copies of a title were out simultaneously as recently as last month, to add one more copy when it comes to hand, just in case, even though there are two on the shelf right now. When demand falls off and the double and triple copies begin to sit on the shelf, the weeders swoop down on them--if it's not a title that reading groups often pick up, or a back title for an author with a currently high-interest book, or a subject that comes up every semester.

WHAT THEY READ: SHELF AVAILABILITY
    The goal of the gift book operation is shelf availability. Most of the donations are books for adults, and the collection I'm feeding with what I fish out of the stream is mostly the circulating adult collection at the main library. Any omission of other age groups, other media, or other branches from discussion here simply means that nearly all of what the patrons donate at the main library are adult books; and an understanding of the main library's adult collection is necessary to make use of them.
    The main adult collection has 73,780 book titles for circulation. There are measures of availability reported in the literature, which draw on many other factors besides whether or not the book is checked out.(FN6) Most methods to measure title availability involve survey projects more elaborate than we will ever make time for, but Lancaster suggests an approach based directly on circulation data readily available.(FN7) Adjusting the idea somewhat, we find that:
    * of the main library adult collection's 73,780 circulating titles, 21 percent of them are in demand at the moment: either the titles have holds (people waiting for them), or some of the copies of the book are out;
    * but because of the deliberate addition of extra copies for titles in demand, only 9 percent of the main library's titles have no copies available on the shelf. All the others have at least one copy available at the main library in spite of their being in demand.
    Frederick Kilgour, the founder of OCLC, wrote an article, "Toward 100 Percent Availability," which lists sixteen possible "Causes of Failure to Obtain Books," only one of which is that someone else has checked it out.(FN8) He concluded that machine-readable downloadable texts would take care of 60 percent of the failures. This may not be on our reality map any decade soon, but Kilgour's title so completely embodies the spirit of what we try to do with donated books that we enlarged it on the photocopier and hung it from a shelf down in the gift book area. As our sign says, we are working "Toward 100 Percent Availability."
    There are other indicators of what the patrons want and don't find, beyond what the circulation system tells us about what's in and what's out. Suggestion-for-purchase cards and interlibrary loan requests tell us what patrons look for that's not in the collection. One of the things we know they want is new books. The voracious readers who haunt the seven-day-book shelves (in general, anything published in the last year), some of them coming in every day to browse for something new, are hard to keep satisfied. Titles new this year, even if we might not have chosen to buy them, and even if they are unlikely to circulate much once they move off the seven-day shelves, are put in the collection when they turn up as gift books.
    The library system filled 17,947 holds last year; the main library filled 8,405. Both the reference staff and the circulation staff keep their eyes on the hold traffic. The titles with the most holds are listed on our Web page, "Books You're Willing to Wait in Line For" (www.ci.santa-fe.nm.us/sfpl/reading2.html), to encourage patrons to see their wait in as amicable a light as possible. Slowly, added copies of this year's hot titles come through the gift books, and supply catches up with demand. Sometimes very slowly: people are waiting forever right now for Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, despite our having bought added copies. The gift process isn't a magic cure for long waits, though it worked in the case of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. We received plenty of donations in pristine condition while people were still waiting for it (and concluded that nobody was actually reading it).
    Shelf availability is an issue that affects more than just popular reading and new books. The one hundred most heavily circulated authors last year in the adult collection included Toni Morrison (#34), Shakespeare (#41), Deepak Chopra (#46), Hemingway (#61), and Joseph Campbell (#89), as well as all the usual favorites. Because the community has donated them to us, there were enough copies available to total a substantial circulation, and for copies to be findable on the shelf in spite of demand. (Copies of the top five favorites--Tony Hillerman, John Grisham, Dick Francis, Sue Grafton, and Patricia Cornwell--total 968 items, 444 of them gifts.)
    Thirty years ago, George Moreland at Montgomery County Libraries experimented with finding the "satisfaction point"--at least one copy in each branch at all times--for a list of ninety adult titles in steady demand at that time.(FN9) The list consisted of mainstream novels, plays, nonfiction, modern classics; works by Ralph Ellison, Marshall McLuhan, James Thurber, Barbara Tuchman, and Tennessee Williams. Montgomery County Libraries used grant money to buy more than 21,000 paperback copies of these titles for the eleven branches. At the end of the project there were still titles from the list whose demand had not been satisfied--patrons couldn't necessarily find one available for checkout.
    SFPL's gift books come from outside the normal acquisitions budget, just as Moreland's "Operation Saturation" paperbacks did and are pumped into the collection in exactly the same spirit. Though the list of titles readers can't get enough of might have changed, and our supply method is serendipitous, SFPL patrons themselves are contributing to the attempt to have something there when they go to the shelf.
    Along comes a good clean donated copy of Adele Faber's How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so Kids Will Talk (Rawson Wade 1980). A check of the catalog reveals that both of the main library's copies were out, and three of the five branch copies either were out or have circulated in the past month. If there are better and more recent titles that do the same job, that's for either the parents or the book selectors to figure out. Meanwhile, this gift is added to the collection, so that it can be found on the shelf.
    One evening a patron could not get a copy of Dante's Inferno at the main library. All that was available at that moment were a couple of copies of the Paradiso; everything else was out. Clearly the library needs more Dante. New copies of John Ciardi's translation (the one this patron wanted) have been ordered because donated copies of the Ciardi are always yellowed and brittle paperbacks from the 1960s or 1970s. As is often the case, gift book serendipity has already contributed to improving the situation: since that evening a couple of weeks ago, a Portable Dante (the more recent 1995 Penguin Portable) and a pristine copy of Robert M. Durling's 1996 translation of the Inferno have appeared in the gifts and are on their way to the shelves.

WHAT THEY READ: STOCK TURNOVER
    The addition of extra copies reduces one of the formal measures of library productivity: stock turnover (annual circulation divided by number of holdings). We intend for there to be a copy or two of the books people want sitting on the shelf for them to find. Adding copies of titles in demand increases circulation, increases the number of satisfied readers, and perhaps helps create an intangible perception among users that the library has what they need; that yes, often what they want is on the shelves. But if additional copies are sitting on the shelves they are not formally earning their keep, because they are not in circulation. Shelf availability works directly against turnover, because as copies of high interest authors and titles are added, turnover drops.
    SFPL also uses gifts to fill holes in its coverage of major authors. If a hardcover copy of Daniel Martin turns up, and (how is this possible?) it's not in the database anymore, the title is cataloged and goes to the shelf. Again, circulation levels for John Fowles' backlist don't contribute to making turnover look good, but SFPL readers expect the books to be somewhere in the system--and that somewhere is the main library. Certainly, more readers want John Grisham's most recent title, but the library hopes also to satisfy the readers who want Fowles, or William Gass--or Alice Munro or Marguerite Duras--though they circulate less frequently per item per year.
    Main library adult patrons read more fiction than anything else. General fiction, and the genre categories of mysteries, westerns, and science fiction, together comprise 45.77 percent of all circulation for the main adult collection, and turn over 2.223 times per year. General fiction, minus the genres, has the highest total circulation because our holdings are large--23.87 percent of all circulating items are general fiction, and they produce 25.7 percent of total circulation, but their turnover is only 1.916 times per item per year. Mysteries have the highest turnover in the collection. Though they account for only 8.72 percent of main adult holdings, they produce 17.2 percent of main adult circulation. Turnover is 3.5 circulations per items per year.
    SFPL gets so many donated mysteries, the trick is to find the time to look closely at enough of them. In addition, the regular flow is augmented by donations from a mysterious reviewer of mysteries who lives outside of town. About twice a year he calls the Friends of the Library to come pick up some of the books he's been sent to review. The library gets several luscious boxes of current titles and back runs of series to help pump up the mystery collection.
    The library's users do read, and donate in proportion, other kinds of books. After mysteries, the Dewey classes with the highest turnover last year--the ones that went in and out most rapidly--constitute a specific and almost personal portrait of the Santa Fe readers who use the main library. Its users demanded (in order by turnover):

Mysteries
290 Comparative religion and other
    religions
130 Paranormal phenomena,
    astrology, channeling
910 Geography and travel
690 Buildings, how to
750 Painting and paintings
000 Generalities (software books and
    encyclopedias)
210 Philosophy of religion (religion
    and science)
710 Civic and landscape art
150 Psychology
720 Architecture

    The library owns a lot of items in these Dewey classes, and they circulate a lot. This may be a somewhat eccentric pattern of use, but our patrons donate enough items to keep up the supply available for each other. It would take a lot of experimentation and study to figure out whether turnover in these classes would be still higher if there were fewer items that, therefore, had to circulate more. We work from the assumption that patrons like to browse in their favorite subjects; and that, even if they have gone to the shelves for a known item, if we keep materials available in that subject, patrons may check out other titles at the same time.
    Although we rely on the gift book process to deepen the supply of books that people want, we sometimes don't pay enough attention to what the gifts do not provide. In some areas for which we don't get usable gift books, for example books about learning languages, turnover is quite high and the number of our holdings extremely small. Thus, we've belatedly discovered that in this area we can't count on the gifts to replace attrition, and the library simply doesn't have enough dictionaries and books for learning Latin, French, or Italian. We've ordered more. It will be interesting to see how this year's turnover in these areas responds to increased supply. (Meanwhile, I have omitted the language books from the list of Dewey classes with high turnover. The fact that the twenty-six items about French turned over slightly faster than the 833 items in the 750s doesn't mean anything, except to tell us we'd better buy a lot more.)
    The gift process, in general, also works to reduce another standard measure, the average age of the collection (remember that 1980 Adele Faber title that still calls for added copies.) For fiction, or history, or biography, age matters less, but for some subjects age is crucial. The library gets few gifts of current books in the 500s (natural sciences). We haven't analyzed our collection age for some time, but a quick look at the shelves hints that this is an area we need to work on. The low turnover in, for example, the 550s (earth sciences) or the 580s (plants) almost certainly indicates a collection too old to give people what they need. But what the gift books in the sciences provide is likely to be more copies of John McPhee's geology books, more Peterson field guides, or lavishly illustrated books about whales or tigers. These are useful and circulate well; but do not address the collection's shortcomings.

CONCLUSION: "BOOKS ARE FOR USE"
    Though the gift books are not a panacea, they go a long way toward helping the library serve the public. The 89,000 circulations of donated items last year were transactions which couldn't have happened if the patrons were not supporting the library and each other with donations.
    The people bringing gift books to the library are natural adherents of Ranganathan's First Law of Library Science: "Books are for use."(FN10) In donating their books, the library's patrons are expressing a hope that someone else will be able to use, appreciate, conserve, recycle, and generally honor them. People don't want to throw their books out or sell them if there is some way instead to extend their useful life. The Friends of the Library volunteers who move tons of boxes of books to and fro, the volunteers working to support processing and cataloging (and shelving), and the staff members who can't help browsing along the tops of the piles and boxes on their way past the gift staging area feel the same way. We share with the library's community a passion for books.
    Whether used as added copies, or as replacements for items on the shelf which have been read to death, or to widen the scope of the collection by providing titles which the library can use but could not afford to acquire, the gift books are a major contribution to what the library can offer. Those gifts which don't go in the collection directly--those the Friends of the Library sell, turning into funds which help underwrite the library's public services and collections--also represent the community's substantial contribution to the library's resources. Books are a format the community continues to care about. In parallel with electronic resources, the traffic around the Internet terminals, summer reading, and the fully occupied tables in the periodical room, real life in this public library continues to revolve around people using books.
ADDED MATERIAL
    Submitted May 1999; accepted June 1999.

FOOTNOTES
1. Marvin Scilkin, "Gift Book Thoughts," The Unabashed Librarian 102 (1997): 11.
2. PubLib. Accessed May 1, 1999, http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/PubLib/archive/.
3. "Holiday Book Sale," Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library Newsletter (Winter 1998): 1.
4. Pat Feather, "Sharing Unsold Books," Friends of the Santa Fe Public Library Newsletter (Winter 1998): 1.
5. This useful phrase comes from Sharon L. Baker, The Responsive Public Library Collection: How to Develop and Market It (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1993), 169.
6. Baker, 212-27; F. W. Lancaster, If You Want to Evaluate Your Library ... (Champaign, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science, 1993), 129-46.
7. Lancaster, 133-35.
8. Frederick G. Kilgour, "Toward 100 Percent Availability," Library Journal 114 (Nov. 15, 1989): 50-53.
9. George B. Moreland, "Operation Saturation," Library Journal 93 (May 15, 1968): 1975-79.
10. S. R. Ranganathan, The Five Laws of Library Science (Madras, India: Madras Library Association, 1957), 26.