Partner organizations are in-region
organizations which serve as intermediaries
between donor organizations and recipients. In
broad terms, they should serve six primary
functions:
- Receiving donations, clearing them
through customs and storing them.
- Providing information about donations and
advertising them to potential recipients.
- Distributing donations.
- Providing checks to insure that the books
and journals are being used effectively.
- Identifying needs of recipients and
conveying them to donors.
- Seeking out ways to make donations more
effective.
The success of partner organizations in
Eastern Europe in fulfilling these six roles has
been mixed. Partner organizations tend to be
understaffed. Often the 'partner' is effectively
one person, assisted by a few laborers, situated
in an organization which divides its resources
among many projects.
The relatively low labor costs in region and
the potential benefits which could accrue from
the creation of more effective partners indicate
the advantage for government and non-governmental
organizations, as well as Western based
suppliers, in providing more support to the
in-region organizations. If partners were endowed
with the necessary resources, Western-based
suppliers could devolve some of their work to
them. The differences in labor costs are so great
that in many cases time-consuming work,
particularly that associated with cataloguing,
could be done in-region, although suppliers which
work through partners must be both more vigilant
in insuring that partners are fulfilling their
roles and more helpful in providing guidance and
support for their operations.
Partner organizations play a
largely successful role in receiving shipments
and clearing them through customs. This is an
important operation in Eastern Europe because the
delivery regimens are complex. For example, the
institution of rigid tax structures, particularly
in the Czech Republic, has made it vitally
important that local not-for-profit
organizations, which are exempt from taxes,
receive shipments. The alternative is to risk
paying value-added taxes (VAT) which would add
considerable costs to shipments.
In some countries, such as
Ukraine and Romania, bureaucracy is more of a
concern than formal taxation. Anyone who has
attempted to clear books through customs in those
countries can testify as to the importance of
understanding the customs regimen and building
relations with representatives at the points of
entry.
While most academic institutions
which have attempted to clear donations through
customs have succeeded in ultimately obtaining
their shipments without excessive costs, the
occasional stories of books and journals
effectively being held hostage by customs
officials demonstrate the importance of involving
an experienced organization in the receipt of
deliveries.
The capacity to store donations
is crucial for partner organizations, because, in
principle, it gives them time to oversee the fair
distribution of books. The performance of those
partners which do not enjoy adequate storage
facilities has unquestionably suffered. While
many partners have been able to acquire storage
facilities from interested libraries or
sympathetic organizations, the occasional
breakdown of such relations, and precipitous
increases in the costs of storage, which are
often closely related, are proving to be growing
problems. Indeed, concern over storage facilities
is probably the most common concern voiced by
partner organizations. This problem is likely to
grow and to raise the costs of donating books to
the region.
In addition to the inadequacies
of storage facilities, partner organizations have
experienced great difficulties in carrying out
the other functions outlined above. Due to a
combination of personnel and equipment shortages,
inefficient use of resources, and insufficient
networking, partner organizations frequently fall
short of their aim of maximizing the utility of
donations.
Partner organizations are, at
times, ineffective in publicizing donations and
overseeing the distribution of the books.
Although the receipt of donations is well
publicized in mailings and newspaper and radio
advertisements, the information provided about
the specific books available to recipients is in
some cases lacking.
As stated above, while partner
organizations can be involved in the distribution
of bulk donations, their most important role
emerges in the distribution of list donations,
such as those sponsored by Sabre and IBB.
A simple axiom is that the more
information provided to the recipient, the
better. A list which provides short descriptions
of books, as is done by IBB, is more helpful than
one which only provides titles. The latter can
lead to confusion, especially for books beyond
introductory levels. The result is
dissatisfaction of recipients and, in the end, a
waste of resources.
Writing short descriptions of
donated books is precisely the type of
labor-intensive work which suppliers should
consider farming out to partner organizations. In
many cases partners are capable of producing
lists by drawing information from an on-line
computer system. Information could be shared with
other partners, who could use descriptions where
the content of donations overlaps.
In many cases, even the
provision of short descriptions is insufficient.
As needs for more advanced books grow,
particularly in the Visegrad countries, more
detailed information is required by recipients.
One approach, which has enjoyed
success in the Slovak Republic, is for partner
organizations to hold exhibitions of donated
books soon after their arrival. This permits
potential recipients to examine copies of the
actual books before filing requests. Space for
the exhibition is provided by one of the prime
recipient libraries, which is compensated with
the donation of at least one free copy of each
book exhibited.
Sabre-Svitlo, a partner
organization in Ukraine, uses an alternative
method through which books are on constant
display in a room at the home office. The display
permits recipients to come in at any time,
examine the offerings, and take desired books
with them that day. A display located in an
office, as opposed to a warehouse, is more easily
accessible and is staffed on a regular basis. In
other countries, books can only be viewed at
warehouses and on odd dates, often at short
notice. A warehouse display is inefficient
because warehouses are located in inconvenient
locations and because the books are often stored
in such a way that they are difficult to view.
The geographic distribution of
donations poses additional challenges. Partner
organizations sometimes fail to make a
geographically equitable distribution of books in
the country in which they operate. For example,
the distribution of books in Ukraine is strongly
biased towards Western Ukraine, particularly
Lviv, where Sabre's partner organization is
located. Almost 52 percent of books donated in
1993 were distributed in the Lviv region, while
other major regions, such as Donetsk, were all
but ignored. Similarly, in the Czech Republic,
IBB's partner, which is based in Plzen, focuses
on western regions and provides relatively few
donations to important centers of learning such
as Brno and Olomouc.
The uneven distribution of books
is primarily the result of difficulties
associated with travelling to view donations and
the high cost of transporting books to recipient
institutions. In Ukraine in particular, many
potential recipients indicate that they are
interested in book donations, but high costs and
complicated logistics have made gathering books
from the Sabre center in Lviv difficult.
Greater and more pro-active
efforts are necessary to involve other regions in
the donation process. The Slovak Academic
Information Agency (SAIA), which serves as a
partner for both IBB and Sabre, uses a system of
four affiliates throughout the Slovak Republic to
assist in distribution. Sabre-Svitlo has a
similar arrangement in Kharkiv, though Ukraine is
so large (the distance from Lviv in the West to
Donetsk in the East is roughly that from Prague
to London) that further efforts are necessary to
spread book donations more equitably. In
particular, to achieve a wider geographic
distribution of donated books, partner
organizations need to subsidise transportation
costs of recipients or to find organizations
which are willing to assist with the distribution
process.
The final three roles of partner
organizations -- providing checks to insure that
donations are efficiently used, identifying needs
of recipients, and seeking out ways to make
donations more effective -- are all centered on
feedback. Unfortunately, it is in this area that
the performance of partner organizations is
weakest.
The greatest inadequacy of
partner organizations is their failure to insure
that donations are effectively used (see
section 3.22). No partner organization
institutionalized regular checks to insure that
book donations are accessible and efficiently
used. In some cases, suppliers have not
explicitly assigned that task to partners, even
though partners, given their proximity to
recipients and their role in the selection of
recipients, are in the best place to carry out
that task. The failure to institute mechanisms to
check the use of book donations has meant that in
spite of the not-infrequent wholesale
disappearance of donated books, sanctions have
rarely been taken against those institutions
whose books have disappeared. In fact, donations
usually will continue to such institutions unless
a sufficiently egregious violation has occurred
to draw the attention of the partner
organization. The disappointing results of the
survey of donations suggests that it is incumbent
upon partner organizations, or their Western
sponsors, to institutionalize means of regular
oversight.
Partner organizations tend to
have greater success in getting feedback about
needs of recipients, which many distributors see
as their primary role. Partners are supposed to
provide donors and suppliers with information
about local needs, so that suppliers can use
their resources more effectively.
Partner organizations do,
however, encounter some difficulties in providing
feedback to donors. On the one hand, their
ability to advise donors about needs are limited
by their unfamiliarity with proposed donations;
they know little more than most librarians about
the utility of most titles. On the other hand,
partner organizations' information networks may
not be sufficient to measure recipients'
attitudes towards donations. Most of the
personnel who work in the book donation sections
of partner organizations are former librarians
who have informal connections with recipients.
Those informal networks are often insufficient to
identify the most needy recipients, particularly
since the majority of lecturers interviewed had
never been consulted about selections for any
book or journal donation project.
Moreover, recipients often find
difficulty in voicing dissatisfaction. Frequently
recipients who have different views than donors
or partners about their needs, or who have
suggestions about means of improving the
donations process, are loath to share their views
with either their local partner or their
suppliers for fear of being cut off from future
donations. This became evident in the numerous
interviews with recipients who, in response to
broad questions about their satisfaction with the
donations process, gave positive reviews, yet in
reply to specific questions about different
aspects of the donations process expressed
indirect criticism and offered potentially
helpful suggestions. The reticence of recipients
may explain why attempts at instituting formal
feedback mechanisms, which a few partners have
tried in the form of surveys, have met with tepid
responses.
There are no simple solutions to
the problems that partner organizations face in
developing checks on recipients and feedback
mechanisms. Successful development of oversight
and feedback mechanisms apparently can only come
from a multi-faceted approach. In the first
instance, partner organizations must become more
pro-active than re-active, seeking out feedback
from recipients and insuring that some form of
verification procedure is in place. Given their
limited resources, they should seek out the
cooperation of other organizations which share
similar interests and which have an active
presence in the region. Members of the Civic
Education Project and of the British Council, all
of whom share concerns about the development of
education in the region, assisted the author in
collecting information for this report. FETC has
instituted a broad range of cooperation with
Peace Corps volunteers, which allows them to
integrate donated books into the Peace Corps'
academic and professional work. These
organizations of Western teachers have people on
the ground at many recipient and potential
recipient institutions. They could certainly
assist partners by checking the availability of
donations, by providing feedback about areas
where donations could be integrated into their
courses and those of their colleagues, and in
some countries, such as Ukraine and the Czech
Republic, by contributing to the equitable
geographic distribution of donations.
Western donors and suppliers
might improve the donation process by providing
greater support for partner organizations which
contribute valuable local input into the donation
process. They could help partners to use
resources more effectively by increasing funding
to partners, by giving partners information about
the successes and failures or other organizations
and by providing greater logistical support. The
Sabre Foundation, for example, has for two years
provided partners with database information about
shipments on disk, thereby easing their work-load
considerably. Western suppliers might facilitate
book distribution by giving database programs for
tracking books to those partners which currently
rely on inadequate programs. In addition, when
partner organizations fail to obtain adequate
feedback from recipients, parent organizations
might step in and solicit feedback directly or
might solicit assistance from other Western
organizations operating in the region.
Partner organizations make an
essential contribution to the book donation
process. They possess a base of knowledge
concerning the procedures of receiving shipments
and clearing customs and they are well positioned
to provide feedback to donors about a country's
particular needs and to take steps within the
country to see that donated books are used
effectively. They can also serve as a low cost
source of some of the labor which donors and
suppliers carry out. Nevertheless, many partner
organizations currently fail to reach their full
potential. The problems of partner organizations
stem from a variety of sources: a lack of
resources, particularly personnel; a failure to
take a more pro-active role in identifying means
through which donated books can have the greatest
possible impact; a lack of coordination with
Western organizations which teach in the region,
such as the Civic Education Project, the Peace
Corps, the British Council and Fulbright. Through
greater contact with recipients and Western
organizations, partners might better channel
donations to recipients which can integrate them
more effectively into academic and research
activities.
Partner organizations, which can
serve as key conduits in the book donation
process, need further financial support to make
book donation projects proceed as they are
currently designed. Financial support, however,
should be contingent upon the adoption of changes
in their mode of operation.
Where possible, partner
organizations should attempt to:
Donors and suppliers should,
where possible:
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