Relevance of Donation to Special Federal Tertiary Institution Libraries in Zaria, Kaduna State

This paper examine the relevance of donations to Special Federal Tertiary Institution Libraries in Zaria, Kaduna State, the objectives of the study are: to find out the donor agencies available to the libraries; the donations given to the libraries and to find out how relevant are the donation from the donors. The study adopted qualitative research approach. While structured and open-ended interview and relevant documents, including giftand donation files, acquisition records and library accession registers were used to collect data for the study. The population of the study consisted of the Special Federal Tertiary Institution Libraries under study while thesubjects of the study were the 41 staff, which included the institutions’ librarians (Liaison Officers) and the resources development unit library staff of each library. Descriptive statistical tools were used to analyze and present the data. The study discovered that the most donated resources to the libraries were books and journals; the findings also revealed that, though all the special federal tertiary institution libraries have one type of donor or the other, they mostly benefit from individual and corporate donors and also most of these resources were current but irrelevant, while those that were relevant were not sufficient to meet the needs of the libraries. In the light of the findings of the study, it was concluded that the special federal tertiary institution libraries studied were inadequately funded, thus, the libraries have sought for an alternative means in terms of donation to support or augment the major source of fund for library resource development, which has contributed positively but not sufficiently to the development of the library. The study recommended among others that, there is need for the government to increase library annual allocation to avoid problem of inadequate funds. And there is a need for those libraries under study to seek for support from local donors such as Nigerian Book Foundation (NBF), Sir Emeka Offor Foundation (SEOF) that could contribute financially or other wise to their library; Donors should try to donate relevant resources to libraries this can be done by seeking advice from a professional librarian