Weeding Adult Fiction

If you've been in the library lately, you've probably noticed how stuffed the shelves are. Sharon and I have been working on weeding adult non-fiction on and off for the past few months, and it's finally having some impact. We focused on non-fiction because it's much easier to weed than fiction. Fiction arguably never goes out of date and does not get replaced by a newer (but different) book on the same topic. As a result, our adult fiction (hardcover) shelves became fuller and fuller.

I started playing with ReportTool, which is one component of our ILS (integrated library system). It had a report that allowed me to enter a number to see which books had not circulated in that number of days. I started small, and worked my way up. At some point between 900 and 1000 days, every adult fiction book was circulated, probably during inventory. So I decided to search for every adult fiction book that hadn't circulated in 900 days (approximately 2 1/2 years).

Sharon and I went through the resulting list and crossed off many of the books that we wanted to keep. I crossed off some of the books in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 series and a few Douglas Adams books, and Sharon picked some more to keep. At that point, the list was still really long (by my rough calcuations, it was still over 2000 books). So we decided that we'd keep newer books regardless of their circulation. I chose 1998 as an arbitrary year.

So last night, Mackenzie (one of the library's pages) went through the shelves to find the books on the list that were published before 1998 that Sharon and I hadn't crossed out. When we arrived this morning, there were stacks of books surrounding my desk. Sharon and I went through the piles and picked some books to save (either because they were part of a series, were written by a very popular author, or because the book sounded too interesting to weed).

We ended up with around 75 books to delete from the catalogue, and we're not even halfway through the Bs. We'll be working on this for the next few weeks, and we're tentatively scheduling a major book sale during Mass Registration in September. So when the time comes, please come out and buy some.