Weeding!

Weeding the reference collection.

Our collection hasn’t been weeded in about a decade—yikes. Previous librarians ordered fiction through a subscription service rather than selecting books themselves, which means we’ve found some real gems. There’s nothing like sci-fi from the ‘70s and murder mysteries about old ladies who knit to get today’s teens reading! One of our main goals for the next few years is to increase the circulation of the fiction collection. We want to be a major source of recreational reading for our students. Buying new fiction is a big part of this, but so is weeding out the books that no longer have any appeal. Still, there’s a few we can’t help keeping just because we get a kick out of them—how could we not love Women of Wonder: Science Fiction Stories By Women About Women, Edited, with an Introduction and Notes (1974)?

Our criteria for weeding is based on circulation stats, publication dates, and quality of content. We’ve spent the first half of the school year working our way through the 500s, 600s, 700s, 800s, the fiction collection, and the reference collection. Most of the books we’ve weeded are simply too old and out-of-date to be useful anymore. There’s also a fair amount of duplication—we don’t need seven encyclopedias about reptiles of North America. Other “surprises” have included a wealth of literary criticism (which not only don't match the curriculum, but we think our students are capable of analyzing literature without too much help), a slew of Eyewitness Books from DK Publishing (which are not only out-of-date but are more suitable for an elementary audience), and a handful of misfits that sent us into fits of giggles when we found them.

Our favorite outdated fiction.

Just a few of the dozens of DK Eyewitness Books hiding in our library.

Selecting weeded books to donate.

We’ve been able to fill important gaps in the collection as we’ve weeded—we realized the other day, as we began to tackle the biographies, that we only had one very short book about Muhammad Ali, and not a thing on Dred Scott. Our discarded books, too, have gone to good causes. A small local public library was dropped, due to budget cuts, by the county system that supported it. The town elected to keep its library open regardless, but needed to replace the books that belonged to the county. About half of the 1350 books we’ve weeded found new a home.

Weeding is a never-ending responsibility, but there’s no better way for new librarians to become familiar with the collection.  And whenever we have a stressful day, there's no better way to relax than to laugh over a few shelves of old, oddball books.

This one made us laugh the most...