A strong library is essential both to the intellectual vitality of the University and to the quality of the education it provides. Our library cannot remain strong without the continued support from people like you, who share our goal to prepare students for life-long learning. The needs of the library are many — building and preserving the collection, adapting new technologies, providing the library staff with adequate professional development and training, enhancing scholarship and research opportunities for our students and faculty, and most importantly, building our educational programs. A gift to the library supports all academic disciplines and programs. We are grateful for your contribution.
Please contact K.T. Vaughan, University Librarian, to discuss monetary gifts.
The easiest way to support the library is to join the Friends of the Library. The Friends provide the generous support needed to make the library a place of growth and scholarly engagement. By pooling large and small donations, the Friends make an essential contribution to meeting current needs and building the collection.
The University Library enjoys the support of many donors who have established, or contributed to, named endowments. These funds provide annual support for specific purposes defined by the donors. Donors may choose to designate their funds to purchase library materials, to support programmatic activities, or both.
Major gifts can be in the form of a one-time monetary donation or in the form of a gift-in-kind, which is usually an important collection of books or media in a specific field of study. Memorial funds and gifts may be set up to acknowledge and honor a person close to the donor.
If you are interested in donating rare or special collections material to the University Library’s Special Collections and Archives, please contact Associate University Librarian Kim Sims. We are eager to discuss donations of manuscripts, ephemera, maps, rare books and incunabula, or personal papers, as well as funding to offset the cost of cataloging, curating, and preserving them.
The University Library generally does not accept book, journal, or other donations for inclusion in the circulating collection, due to a lack of staff time and space for processing gifts. If you would like to donate particularly unique materials that are relevant to the W&L curriculum and that the library does not already own, please contact University Librarian K.T. Vaughan to discuss options.
We accept donations for our occasional book sales, which support library programming and purchasing. Please contact University Librarian K.T. Vaughan for information about when and how to donate books for the sale. The library will sell, donate, catalog, or otherwise dispose of books and other materials at its discretion. Rockbridge Regional Library (RRL) accepts book donations for their monthly Friends of the Library sales. To donate to RRL, please fill out the form at https://www.rrlib.net/donate/.
The library has implemented a preservation program to ensure that the items in Special Collections will be there for future generations. If you would like to combine your support for the library with a special interest, consider adopting a piece of history by sponsoring, or contributing towards, the restoration of an item in need of preservation. A label indicating the name of the donor will accompany each restored item and will be included in the catalog record.
Please contact Associate University Librarian Kim Sims to discuss this opportunity.