From left to right: GLP's Denniston Bonadie and Olubayi Olubayi thank Myrin's Information Technology Librarian David Mill for the donation.

The abstracts filled 450 boxes and weighed a combined 8.5 tons. The books once took up 582 linear feet of shelf space in the Library but are no longer needed since the Library now has electronic access to the research abstracts via the Internet.

On their way to Nigeria will be 2,106 volumes of the American Chemical Society's Chemical Abstracts, published between 1907 and 2001. 429 volumes of Biological Abstracts, published by BIOSIS, the Biological Sciences Information Service, between 1969 and 1991, will also go from Ursinus to Ile-Ife through GLP.

"We are very pleased to be able to share this important scientific information with the student and faculty researchers at Ile-Ife University in Nigeria," said Charles Jamison, Director of the Myrin Library. "The Global Literacy Project is doing important work, and the Ursinus College Library is happy to donate our Biological and Chemical abstracts to further the cause.”

GLP is a New Jersey-based non-profit charity organization that is committed to fostering literacy throughout the developing world. Ursinus is among the more recent participants in GLP’s mission to promote research and development at African universities.

The volunteers at the Global Literacy Project collect surplus and discarded books and computers, which would otherwise come to rest uselessly in American landfills, and distribute them to disadvantaged communities in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. GLP’s efforts create a situation in which everyone wins: institutional and individual donors are relieved of their surplus educational materials; America gains a cleaner environment as GLP rescues those materials from landfills and ships them, through the generosity of sponsors, to poor communities in developing countries; those communities then gain access to literacy and development through these materials.