Journal Donations

Fall is near, and whether or not you're in academia, this time of year often represents a renewal, a kind of fresh start.  It's around this time of year that people consider cleaning out their offices, maybe even moving from a collection of older print journals to a reliance on electronic archives - we certainly understand that!  

While we do appreciate an interest in donating materials to Treadwell, we generally accept very few donations, and almost never donations of print journals.  We do have a list of organizations that do sometimes accept donations of this kind, although Unclutterer recently provided some good advice that may be more useful: 

Right after college, I went to work for a small publication called the Kansas Government Journal ... I would often field calls from teachers, librarians, and individuals looking for back issues. I never, however, received offers from people wanting to give us these back issues. It would have been nice had someone offered to give us their back copies since we had a limited supply.

Since older medical materials might have been superceded by new information, routing them back to the publishers may be the best way to make sure that the material is used in a way that puts it in context.  The comments section of this article provides many other helpful suggestions as well:

• The National Library of Medicine's journal donation program
• Operation Medical Libraries
• Contact the Medical Library Association for donation information

Again, since medicine is a field that constantly changes, it's best to find a program or organization that will be able to put the information in your resources in context.  I'm sure they will thank you for putting your resources to good use!