The best advice I can give to anyone who does weeding of a library collection is to take your time. Go as slowly as is practical and put some thought into the process. Not only will you make better, more
Category: Practical Librarian
This is the place where we put more serious discussions of librarianship.
Collection Management and Interlibrary Loan
A submission came in to Awful Library Books recently from a librarian who said they had an interlibrary loan request for an item that they were embarrassed to have in the collection. Rather than fulfill the request, they weeded the
Collection Management Policies
Let’s talk about collection management policies. Stay with me, now! A library’s collection helps it meet its mission. The collection management policy explains how that will be accomplished. I’ve seen selection policies, deselection policies, and a gift policies, but that
The Mission-Collection Connection
A library’s collection exists to help the library meet its mission. When you are having trouble letting go of non-circulating library materials, or talking the Powers That Be into allowing you to do some weeding, this is a great point
Primary Source Material in the Public Library
You may be tempted to keep older history materials, such as those written during the time the event was happening, because they are “important” or as valuable primary source material. Here’s the thing about primary sources: they are valuable and
Size Matters: Estimating Shelf Capacity
Once upon a time, Holly mentioned that I had a special formula for determining shelving capacity. This brought about a flurry of requests from many people. The reality is that I had little scraps of paper with a few notes
Managing Periodicals
When I started my current job, I was assigned a collection to manage: periodicals. Honestly, I was less than excited about that. I was responsible for periodicals in my old job too, and was hoping to get away from it!
Dealing With the Staff Hoarder
Holly and I are fond of telling people in our presentations that every library has at least one hoarder on staff. The punchline is, if you say no, then it probably is you. Without fail, at every presentation we have