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Purpose – Although not extensively documented, academic libraries in the United States of America have been involved in fund-raising for centuries. In more recent years, decreases in university budgets forced academic libraries to rely more heavily on philanthropy in order to operate or expand collections. However, much remains unknown about many aspects of academic library fund-raising. This study expands knowledge regarding library development efforts so that scholars and library administrators can better understand library fund-raising and become more successful in raising money.

Findings – Development work for academic libraries has shown to differ from other forms of development activities on a campus due to the fact that donors to academic libraries tend to differ from other kinds of donors on a campus. This research highlights strategies academic library development officers believe work in cultivating donors from a limited target population and how they believe this differs from or is similar to the work of other development officers in higher education.

Practical and social implications – This research sought to understand how organizational placement of the library development officer in the university has an impact on successful fund-raising.

Originality/value – This is the first research to directly study academic library development officers. This will help library administrators and those involved with academic library development efforts learn what library development officers believe works and doesn’t work in fund-raising.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of international library materials aid in primary schools and to outline obstacles to effective utilization for maximum literacy benefits among primary school children.

Data were gathered via interviews, observation, focus group discussions and document analyses.

Findings indicate that teachers were trained by Kenya National Library Services Kisii Branch staff on basics of library materials management before literacy materials were sent to the schools; teachers and pupils reported that development of vocabulary and better essay writing are some of the benefits of the donated materials; and culturally distanced materials and school dynamics impact negatively on the effective utilization of the donated library resources.

The authors recommend that donors work hand in hand with the Ministry of Education and other local stakeholders that it may be possible to address obstacles to proper and highly effective implementation of literacy empowerment projects.

The findings of this study are from original research and the implications must be treated as such.

Humanitarian relief organisations such as charities count on donations to provide assistance to people in need when disasters occur. In the UK, about 11,200 charity shops collect second-hand goods from donors to raise funds for their parent charity to support target beneficiaries. As their numbers increase, charity shops are finding it difficult to secure good quality stock. Furthermore, they may need to plan ahead to secure sufficient stock when the economy experiences a downturn. This paper identifies the charity shop's role and its donation flow in the multi-tier supply chain and empirically assesses the barriers that influence intention to donate with a mixed-methods approach.

In order to explore the charity shop's role within the multi-tier supply chain, this study begins with a literature review and then develops a conceptual model. In order to empirically evaluate the barriers that influence intention to donate, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 charity shop managers and collected 222 usable questionnaires from donors. The interpretive structural modelling (ISM) approach was applied to examine the interrelationship among barriers and rank their priority.

This paper identifies ten significant barriers that influence intention to donate: lack of good quality items for donation; lack of information on how charity shops make use of donations; lack of familiarity with the donation process; lack of information of what items can be accepted by charity shops; lack of awareness of the impact that donations make; the difficulty of being available at the scheduled times for charity shops' free pick-up services; the difficulty of donating during shops' opening hours; the difficulty of finding parking to access charity shops; and living too far away from charity shops. In particular, the questionnaires' results indicate that lack of good quality items is the most significant barrier. This is also reflected in the ISM model, and thus needs more attention.

The results are very useful for charity shops themselves to understand current barriers to securing good quality stock and to develop potential stock-securing interventions based on these barriers' priority.

Although charity shops have been investigated by several researchers, their supply chain remains insufficiently explored. This paper fills this gap by identifying the charity shop's role and its donation flow in the supply chain and by empirically assessing the supply-side barriers with a mixed-methods approach.

This paper aims to explain the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER) and how libraries can make a good case to donors to fund these types of projects.

The literature reveals that donors have been willing to support projects that save students money on textbooks. Course reserves have traditionally been a popular model. More recently, libraries have found funding for OER initiatives. These types of initiatives are discussed and several case studies of donors currently funding OER projects are examined.

Donors, internal and external to the library and to the university, have shown an interest in funding projects that reduce textbook costs for students. They have funded course reserves in the past and have begun to fund OER projects. There are both qualitative and quantitative methods to induce donors to fund these types of projects.

Libraries have traditionally supported the mission of access to information and for academic libraries that has sometimes included access to textbooks. Course reserves are a limited solution, whereas when an OER replaces an expensive textbook, it is a viable solution for all students.

OERs have strong social implications. Any person, whether associated with an institution of higher learning, or not, can access the information in an OER and learn the associated content.

There is some literature on specific OER projects. This paper aims to fill a gap in the literature, specifically on how to approach donors regarding OER initiatives.

To define the elements of a gift books policy.

Research based on a review of library gift policies.

Provides libraries with general guidelines as to what should be included in a gift book policy.

Provides assistance to libraries to find a way to explain to prospective donors how the library handles donations and gifts.

Donor-conceived (DC) offspring raised in lesbian-parent and heterosexual-parent families have different historical chronologies, which are clusters of events that provide frameworks for shaping contemporary views of sperm donors and donor siblings. Using surveys collected by the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), the largest U.S. web-based registry, we found that DC offspring from different family forms have somewhat different views about meeting both the donor and donor siblings. In general, all offspring are curious about the donor. All offspring want to know what the donor looks like and they believe that even minimal contact will help them understand themselves better. However, when compared to offspring from heterosexual-parent families, offspring from lesbian-parent families are less likely to want to have contact with the donor. For offspring from lesbian-parent families, donor conception is considered a normal and accepted part of family life and the donor is deemed irrelevant to the family’s construction. Especially among those who live with two heterosexual parents (where both parents are often assumed to be genetic relatives), offspring want to know the donor because they believe he holds the key to important information that the legal (or social) father cannot provide. Most DC offspring want to meet donor siblings although the interest is somewhat weaker among the offspring in lesbian-parent families. Offspring regard donor siblings as special relations who will not disrupt the natal family and who might even become part of a new kind of “extended family” network.

The topic of private fundraising has generated considerable interest among academic librarians in recent years, and there are reasons to believe that the climate of the next decade will enhance this trend. Colleges and universities expect tight budgets through most of the nineties. There are remarkably few conventional sources of support for higher education: tax revenues, student tuition, and externally funded research. All are coming under increasing pressure. For those of us in the state‐support sector, state and local taxes are the most important revenue source. But many states are in fiscal crisis. In 1991, for the first time in thirty years, the amount allocated by states to higher education actually decreased from the previous year: a drop of $80 million nationally. Measured as a percentage of state budgets, higher education support has been shrinking since 1982.

This paper seeks to investigate the influence of stakeholders on accountability relationships and the development of accounting practices and processes within two Tanzanian non‐governmental organisations (NGOs).

Stakeholder analysis is employed to evaluate the positions of stakeholder groups in terms of Mitchell et al.'s attributes of power, legitimacy and urgency. Data analysis was undertaken using a grounded theory approach.

The research found that overseas donors were the stakeholders with the highest salience as a result of which they significantly influenced accountability relationships and accounting processes and practices within NGOs. Despite the often proclaimed NGOs' objective of improving welfare of beneficiary groups there appeared to be little accountability by NGOs to beneficiaries. Differences in the accounting functions in the NGOs were explained by the influence of dominant stakeholders, the credibility of the organisation and its managers and the varied ways through which the organisations negotiated and accounted for funding. Moreover, accounting was virtually unemployed in internal decision‐making processes indicating that it was largely a tool for satisfying claims of the highly salient stakeholders.

This paper makes a contribution to the literatures of both stakeholder theory and NGO accounting. From the grounded theory analysis it is suggested that the stakeholder framework of Mitchell et al. could be usefully extended in the three areas of power asymmetries of definitive stakeholders, stakeholder salience asymmetries across organisational phenomena and asymmetries across time.

The paper contributes to the empirical accounting literature by seeking a deeper understanding of how and why accounting and accountability relationships develop within NGOs. It sheds light on a type of organisation that has not been extensively studied in the public sector management literature.