1. 2005 marks the 125th anniversary of the modern Elsevier company, together with the 425th anniversary of the original House of Elzevir family publishing house.

2. To celebrate the company’s unique double birthday, Elsevier has initiated a program called “A Book in Your Name” under which Elsevier will donate a book on behalf of all the company’s 6,700 employees to one of 10 university libraries in developing countries.

3. It is well established that there is a direct relationship between the diversity and richness of institutional library catalogues on the one hand and progress in academic study and research on the other. “A Book in Your Name” marks Elsevier’s firm commitment to help libraries in developing countries expand their array of resources.

4. The 10 beneficiaries are the libraries at the universities of: Sierra Leone; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Zambia; Malawi; Mali; Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique; Makerere, Uganda; San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador; Francisco Marroquin, Guatemala; and, the National Centre for Scientifc and Technological Information (NACESTI), Vietnam. These libraries were selected by an Advisory Panel of distinguished librarians who have worked to support the growth of libraries in need all over the world.

5. Each library will receive almost 700 books thanks to this innovative program.

6. Under the program, Elsevier employees will be able to personally select a library to receive a book from a core collection of the company’s most important and widely used scientific, technical and medical (STM) publications.

7. During the 20th century, as Elsevier grew from being a small family publisher to one of the world’s largest and most influential STM publishers, the company acquired and merged with a number of the world’s most important book publishers. These include: North Holland, Excerpta Medica, Mosby, Pergamon Press, Urban & Fischer, W.B. Saunders, Churchill-Livingstone, Editora Campus and Academic Press, among many others.

8. Among the best-known and most influential of the books currently published by Elsevier are: Gray’s Anatomy, the bible of surgical and anatomical practice, the ground-breaking 1948 Kinsey Report on human sexuality, The Harriet Lane Handbook, Total Patient Care, Dorland’s Pocket Medical Dictionary, The Cecil Textbook of Medicine, Noyes Modern Clinical Psychiatry, Mosby’s Medical Nursing and Allied Health Dictionary, and Berne & Levy’s Physiology. The catalogue also includes Miller’s Anatomy of the Dog, a text which made W.B. Saunders America’s leading veterinary publisher. Copies of these and many other core texts will be among those donated to the ten beneficiary libraries.

9. The “A Book in Your Name” program aims to link the individual action of all Elsevier employees to a collective company effort to share knowledge about science and health around the world.

10. Elsevier provides ongoing support to two United Nations programs which bring research information to developing nations.  HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative), a program of the World Health Organization of the United Nations, provides institutions in developing countries free access to key health research journals. Similarly,  AGORA (Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture), offered by the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization, gives students, researchers, and academics in developing countries access to scientific information for free.