Weeding the stacks

I spent a few hours weeding on Saturday. For the uninitiated, weeding (in a library) refers to removing books from our collection based on a number of criteria including age, circulation, relevance, and obsoletion. I started with a list of books that had not been circulated in 500 days. This seems arbitrary, but it was a nice round number, and gave me a good-size list of books to work with.

The resulting list of books was simply a place to start from -- not the list of books to be weeded. I went through the list of adult non-fiction, and checked the list to see if the books were duplicates (there are times when the library ends up with two copies of a particular book), outdated (science and health books in particular), obsolete (if we had a newer edition of the same book, or a newer book on the same subject), or just not used (a few of the books on the list had never been circulated).

If a book hadn't circulated in 500 days and failed another criteria for keeping the book, I pulled it from the shelves, and put it into a stack near my desk for further review with Sharon. We ultimately kept five of the books (there were around sixty in the stack) because of high overall circulation (one or two of the books had been signed out 9-10 times overall) or relevance (a book about the history of the Peace region that we had two copies of). The rest were deleted from our catalogue and will be sold.

Some of the books I weeded include
extremely dated medical books (AIDS, the medical mystery [1983])
old financial books (Chand's top 50 mutual funds [2002])
general out of date books (The Complete guide to Canadian universities [1992])

There are quite a few benefits of weeding, and most of them apply here. First, weeding removed out of date books that could contain incorrect, if not dangerous, information. Second, weeding allowed Sharon and I to identify some gaps in our collection. Finally, our shelves are extremely crowded at the moment, and weeding helped to give library staff a little more space to work with.