This is the place where we put more serious discussions of librarianship.
Some of the more difficult weeds in libraries are award winners. The Newbery, Caldecott, National Book Award, Hugo, Bram Stoker, Nebula, etc. etc. etc. awards are wonderful choices for most public libraries – and even some school, university, and special
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
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
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
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
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
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
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!
