Oh, lordy the useless things people donate to public libraries...like old encyclopedia sets. Very VERY rarely is something donated which we can/will actually catalog and put on the shelf to circulate. We have an acquisitions budget for actually useful material, thank goodness.
During the pandemic's worst phases we have to suspend donations entirely in the interest of protecting public health.
Most of the donations are passed on to our Friends of the Library organization, who store the donations in their own space in the basement and organize a fraction of these for (re)sale back to the public at periodic book sales which raise money for the library's general funds. When I was young and foolish I avidly attended library book sales, both collegiate and public and collected many an interesting book.
It's fine if you want to donate to the public library and if you're doing it as a tax write off, hey, go for it. But more often than not you'd be better off selling off stuff at Half-Price Books...at least you get a few bucks to either keep & save or spend on something new (to you) for a cheaper price. And there are some books so useless you might as well dump them in paper recycling than burden the staff of Half-Price Books OR the local library. Not every book needs to be archived, and Public Libraries are decidedly NOT archives.
It's above my pay grade to crunch the numbers to know if the donations we take in and house (and the space we allocate to store them) are "worth" the funds raised through book sales; and I suppose there's the intangible value of people feeling like they're helping a social institution (even when they may not actually be in dollars and cents). Luckily the Friends members are volunteers, so it's not as if much staff time & pay go into managing the donation vault. Weeding is always painful but a necessary part of growing and modernizing and keeping a library collection useful and relevant to its community. The weeded materials get thrown in with the donated (but not usable) material, too, all for re-sale to raise money. Circulation stats drive a lot of the decision-making in weeding. No matter how prestigious a book may be nationally or internationally, if it just collects dust on your shelf it's doing nobody any good. But as my old boss used to say, "a circ is a circ" whether it's in-system or Interlibrary Loaned. If a book isn't popular in your home community but is often borrowed by neighboring systems, you should probably retain the book, because the circulation stats still justify keeping it. I just wish people were better informed what kinds of book donations ARE actually maximally useful (extra copies of high demand recent best sellers, etc) and which are not. Yes, we'll take your donation and yes, thank you, and we'll maintain a polite smile as we accept it, but inwardly we may be rolling our eyes just a bit.
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