BYU-Hawaii's Joseph F. Smith Library donated about 80,000 government texts today—almost its entire collection—to the Hamilton Library of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
The transfer constitutes a five year off-site housing agreement, at the conclusion of which BYU-Hawaii will release the collection to UH permanently.
The donation comes as a boon to UH, who lost nearly all of its 2.8 million government documents housed at the Hamilton Library in a devastating flood that swept through Manoa valley last October.
"We are extremely grateful for BYU-Hawaii's generosity in providing this material to us," said Gwen Sinclair, head of the regional government documents depository with Hamilton Library. "BYU-Hawaii's gift will provide us with much-needed current government publications as well as historical material.
"The librarians at Joseph F. Smith library are to be commended for coming to our aid and helping us fulfill our mission of providing access to government information," Sinclair added.
"We felt that it would be a better stewardship of our collection of U.S. government documents to house them at the University of Hawaii at Manoa," said Marynelle Chew, head of technical services for the Joseph F. Smith Library.
Chew went on to explain that BYU-Hawaii is a designated selective depository, which means it receives and keeps only those items it thinks will best support the needs of its students and residents of its congressional district; whereas UH Manoa is the regional depository for Hawaii, whose document collections are more complete and see heavy use in servicing a larger population base.
"Along with being a regional depository, Hamilton Library is a research library," added Douglas Bates, director of the Joseph F. Smith Library. "They have a greater need for these documents than we do."
While the transfer is a sacrifice on the part of BYU-Hawaii, it will not hurt the Joseph F. Smith Library or inhibit its patrons.
"We are retaining those few materials that appear to best meet the information needs of our student population and the residents of Congressional District 2," Chew said. Bates added that "a lot of government info is being produced online these days," one of the reasons BYU-Hawaii was able to freely donate its collection.
Sinclair also ensured that "should anyone at BYU-Hawaii need one of the transferred items, we will make it available to them in our library or provide it to the Joseph F. Smith Library through interlibrary loan."
The transfer will actually be mutually beneficial, freeing up much-needed space in the Joseph F. Smith Library and strengthening relationships between the two universities, in addition to helping Hamilton Library recover from their loss.
"Space was part of our consideration when we looked at the pros and cons of doing this," Bates said. "We buy 6,000 books a year, and if we added that without managing the existing collection, we would soon be out of shelf space."
Chew added, "We had been examining the notion of curtailing our selection profile before the October [flood] at UH. That event served as an impetus for us to move more quickly, and we saw an opportunity to be good citizens and neighbors—kind of a win-win for both of us."
Together with BYU in Provo, Utah, BYU-Hawaii has developed a cooperative working relationship with UH in terms of library service agreements, according to both Bates and Chew.