A lot of people donate their family histories to the LDS Family History Center in Salt Lake, given permission to microfilm, the history will be available all over the world. If you want your copy back, they will film it (at no cost to you) and send it back to you. ---------- From: Mary Jo C. Martin[SMTP:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, March 12, 1999 12:06 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [HART-L] Donating to lg libraries Dear Rootswebbers: A gentleman on another list asked about donating a copy of a family history manuscript to the Library of Congress. I replied, and thought that cousins/fellow researchers on other lists might also benefit from my answer. Hope this helps someone out there. I wish you all good luck. (I wish I was ready to publish!) %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Dear Abe, and anyone else thinking about donating copies of family research to large libraries and research institutions: I used to work for the Library of Congress, and I wanted to give you some advice about donating a copy of your in-laws' family history manuscript to them, so as to avoid disappointment. As you may know, the Library of Congress is the physical and organizational site for the US Copyright Office. Copyright requirements stipulate that the Copyright Office receive two copies of any book that the author wishes to register. One copy automatically goes into the Library's collections. As such, the Library gets copies of all sorts of different things each year. When I left them in 1989, they had more than 8 million items in their collections. I'm sure that number has grown exponentially since then. My point is that a great deal of what the Library receives is discarded, either right away, or eventually. There just isn't enough room to store it all! The three Library of Congress buildings that you can visit behind the Capitol in Washington, DC are just the tip of the iceberg. They also have warehouses in Maryland that cover acres. The Library will keep things that fall within their mandate -- stuff that will advance Congressional research, or rare and valuable items. They assume (or hope) that items of lesser value to the nation will be available elsewhere in other libraries or research institutions. So give them a call before donating a precious copy of your family history. They most probably would politely decline to keep it, and would counsel you instead to give it to local libraries or county historical societies, where it might be enjoyed and used by people researching in the family's locality. Best wishes, and please congratulate your in-laws for having put together an account of their escape. I'm sure that it is intriguing story that will be appreciated by many people. Mary Jo C. Martin Melbourne, Australia [email protected]