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The
Library needs your help. In the Campaign for the University of Florida,
the George A. Smathers Libraries seek to create endowments that will sustain
the expansion, dissemination, and preservation of our collections to better
support academic programs, both new and traditional, being taught for graduate
and undergraduate students. Currently holding the largest collection
of information in the state, our collections reflect the university's increasingly
broad research and instruction programs. Over the past 100 years,
faculty and librarians have collaborated in building collections that now
total more than 3.3 million volumes in practically every written language
published on every populated continent. But more is badly needed.
As faculty and students have told us in every survey, what you most want
are broader, deeper collections.
The Library's central mission
is to provide access to knowledge at the time our students and faculty
need it. Thus, our primary strategy in the campaign is to create
endowments for the acquisition of books, journals, and electronic databases.
Libraries offer a powerful prospect for giving in that they offer donors
the opportunity to have university-wide impact, and at the same time, a
unique capability to address the donor's most specific area of interest.
It is just this rationale that we hope will be appealing to our donors.
We also seek funding for
a well-equipped imaging laboratory that will enable us to preserve and
disseminate UF's unique and rare materials. Making electronic images
will provide the means for the Libraries to support undergraduate use of
fragile research materials that would be destroyed if dozens of students
used them each semester and to disseminate the materials widely to scholars
from any part of the globe with access to the Internet. It will also
assist the library in bringing together disparate information on the same
subject that may have been published in different formats or publications
and permit us to begin development of a text center.
And finally, we seek funding
for a blast freezer that will give us the capacity to freeze-dry library
materials that have been damaged by water or mold, and to deinfest materials
that have been infested by insects. |
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