Buy India a Library

Featured on Slideshare! (and other #buyalib presentations)

Andromeda — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:24:09 +0000

Ned’s presentation on Buy India a Library was featured on the front page of Slideshare today (!). I am so damn proud of him, and I trust Jan and Justin are too . Ned also posted about this presentation on his blog.

I also gave a talk about the project at TedX Princeton Library. And Jan did a poster session about it at the NextLibrary conference in Aarhus, Denmark in June.

And who knows, maybe there will be more .

#buyalib HAS gone to the ball.

Andromeda — Sun, 08 May 2011 10:47:44 +0000

Well, it took us a little longer than we’d hoped to sort out the logistics of getting money across various borders and currencies, and cobbling together one big gift out of our separate Paypal accounts, but now that is all done, and all of your donations in the hands of Good Gifts. And here is what you made:

A library for India! (pics to come when we get ‘em)

And…

100 extra books.

And a newspaper subscription.

And an additional £520 to make the library extra-awesome.

(This isn’t your library — that isn’t built yet — but we hope it will make kids happy like this!)

And…

FOUR bookmobiles in Africa.

Again, thank you more than words can say for your enthusiastic support of this project. We hope to be able to get pictures and reports about your libraries when they are up and running, and we’ll report about that here and on Twitter and the Facebook page.

#buyalib SHALL go to the ball!

thewikiman — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 09:13:28 +0000

Sorry we’ve taken so long to update this blog with a final total – we had one final donor to add to our total. That’s now all done, and the incredible news is between us we raised more than two-thousand, four-hundred pounds. More than enough to reach our target – getting on for twice as much, in fact!

That means, more libraries in Africa, and a bigger library in India. Amazing.

For more details, check out these Thank You slides.

Thank you very much for all your help! Libraries will now be built, where previously there were none.

What´s keeping us busy? Status £ 1920,82

janholmquist — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 09:11:35 +0000

Dear supporters

A very short update on what´s keeping the #buyalib team busy.

We collected donations via a paypal account in the UK and one in USA. We are looking for cheapest way to transfer the US money to UK so we can get all the money to work for the library in India.
We are working on how we get information from India through out the process to keep you informed about YOUR library via this blog.
We are waiting on an answer that could give the project a last money boost – but nothing is sure yet.

Last: Let me tell you that out donation status is £ 1920,82 – which is awesome. Thank you once again for your contributions and interest in our project.

#buyalib update – £1,384, and we close this down on Friday

thewikiman — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:33:25 +0000

A brief update post. Thanks to some incredibly generous donations, we are now up to one thousand, three hundred and eighty-four pounds! This is enough to buy the permanent library in India we were aiming for, AND a mobile library in Africa!

Thank you all so much for promoting and donating to this project.

We’re finishing this on Friday, exactly two weeks after we started – amazing how much you can achieve collectively in a fortnight. So, if you still want to donate, make sure you get in there quick!

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

Thank you.

status update: £750!

Andromeda — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 17:07:04 +0000

In just one week, we have raised £750! That’s 60% of what we need to build a library in India.

For reference, £750 would also buy you one of these:

Or, if you prefer, 454 of these:

In other news, a lot of you have asked for more specifics about how and where the money will be spent, and we’ve contacted the charities involved with questions, so I hope to be able to share that information with you shortly.

We remain amazed at your generosity and supportiveness: thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

We have the bricks but we also need books

janholmquist — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 20:35:22 +0000

A short post to thank you for getting us more than half way towards our goal in a week.

£ 680 now collected

We now have the bricks but we still need someone to make them into a library and add books and librarians.

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

Who spends the money we’re raising, and how?

thewikiman — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 09:55:42 +0000

There has been a huge amount of interest in the Buy India a Library campaign, and so far you’ve raised £480 for the cause, from nothing. This is amazing! But we’ve got a long way to go, so please help us keep the momentum up if you can, by giving (donate button below), spreading the word via your own blogs or Twitter feeds, or both. We can see from when the donations come in that there is a direct correlation between people blogging about this, and people donating – if you write a post, you may just catalyse some charitable giving.

We want to provide some more detailed information about exactly what we’rre raising money for. People already know how we’re going to spend the money, but they want to know precisely who is spending it too. So, here’s some more info.

The company through which we are buying these libraries is UK-based, and called GoodGifts.org. This is an online catalogue filled with philanthropic gifts, and it has achieved a huge amount – over 100,000 gifts have been given via the charity. Just imagine, all of those could have been book tokens… Instead, the work GoodGifts have done has given 150 villages fresh water where they had none before, helped 150,000 orphans through dowries, and 4,000 children have been given the gift of sight having previously been blind!

It is the brain-child of the Charities Advisory Trust, a registered charity with more than 25 years of experience. What’s great about GoodGifts is that the money is guarenteed to be used for the specific purpose advertised – it doesn’t go into a general pot of cash, it is used specifically for what the customer chooses. So, via this campaign libraries will come into existence which were not in existence previously, thanks to your donation! GoodGifts charges a £4.95 handling fee on top of the cost of the gift – we (buyalib) will pay this fee, and the entirety of the money we raise will go directly to the charities involved.

Once we give the money to GoodGifts, specialist charities take over to administer the donation, and in this case literally build and kit out the libraries. The library in India will come from the Rural Literacy and Health Programme (RLHP), set up in 1984. To quote the organisation’s website, the RLHP “…operates in 56 slums and 25 villages in Mysore, Mandya & Chamarajanagar districts of Karnataka State in South India covering a population of 50,000.”

The donkey drawn libraries are delivered by the African Educational Trust a UK registered charity formed more than 50 years ago, dedicated to support education in Africa. The mobile libraries are aimed at kids, and contain around 100 fiction, non-fiction and reference books – the libraries travel to schools in Somalia, Sudan and Uganda (all of which are low on supplies of books, due to being former war zones).

We’ve added a FAQ page to this blog, which talks about these issues and many more relating to the #buyalib project. If you have any other questions we’d be happy to answer them!

In the meantime, if you can give any money at all, please use the Donate button below (the currency is £). Thank you very much.

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

The Video Guide to Buy India a Library

janholmquist — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:31:54 +0000

Do you want to know all about our project in less than two minutes? Watch this video where Andromeda Yelton shares the basic facts.

The video was recorded by American Libraries Magazine at the ALA Mid Winter meeting in San Diego, USA and published here.

Please help us by donating! The currency is in Pounds Sterling.

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

We’ve raised enough for two mobile libraries, in just 24hrs!

thewikiman — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:27:29 +0000

The Buy India a Library campaign kicked off yesterday, and thanks to incredibly generous support from across the world we already have more than three hundred pounds! Donations from Europe, Australia and the UK have come flooding in, meaning that within 24hrs of launch we had already recieved enough cash to buy two mobile libraries in Africa, and a Book Grant. This is absolutely amazing – thank you!

If you can help us get further towards are ultimate goals by dontating, that would be fantastic (note the amount is in the currency Sterling / Pounds) – we still have a long way to go to reach our goals.

(Donate button removed after close of campaign. –ay)

Thank for any help you can give us! Whether it’s by donating using the button above, or just spreading the word about the campaign by any and all means (including tweeting a link to this post, or sharing it on Facebook – or just by telling your friends or sending an email to staff at your library) we are incredibly grateful – it’s amazing to think that where there was previously nothing, now there will be books and libraries – crowd sourced from librarians everywhere.

WOOT!

Subscribe to the blog for more updates on how we’re doing – and stay tuned for an in-depth look at exactly how and where the money is spent, and the organisations who are spending it.