Entertaining Non-Fiction Coming Soon!

It's been a while, but here I am again to tell you about something exciting happening at the library.

When Paula Coutts joined the library in late 2010, she told Sharon and me about a section in a library she'd used to work at:  ENF - Entertaining Non-Fiction.

We'd never heard of it, and Paula started to explain.  Non-fiction falls into two broad categories:  informative, and entertaining.  A book that contains recipes, instructions on tying your shoes, or general facts falls into the former.  The book may be interesting, and probably does contain valuable information, but is generally read for the purpose of learning rather than for enjoyment.

Entertaining non-fiction is different.  It's still non-fiction, and is still based on facts, but it's not boring.  Most of them tell a story and draw the reader in.  We've spent chunks of time over the last few months (the last few weeks in particular) pulling entertaining non-fiction books from our shelves so that they can be grouped together with a new, easy-to-see label added to their spines:

When you see this label, it means that the book should be entertaining, not just informative.  Here's a sample of the books we've pulled to create our entertaining non-fiction collection (thanks, Elliott, for picking most of these out to highlight!):

Lager heads - Paul Brent

• Fascinating history of the competition between Molson and Labatt in Canada, including the origins of Molson's "I Am Canadian" ad campaign and the ongoing competition for new products (dry, draft, and ice beers, etc.)

The Boy who harnessed the wind - William Kamkwamba

•  The story of an African boy who built his own working electricity generating windmill from spare parts he scrounged.

The Ice pilots - Michael Vlessides

• Describes the planes and pilots that fly for Buffalo Airways, an arctic airline, and the challenges they face in the frosty skies.

Sasquatch:  the apes among us - John Green

•  Explores the stories of the legendary Sasquatch and the people who've searched for it for years.

The Bin Ladens:  the story of a family and its fortune - Steve Coll

•  Still wondering what shaped a man like Bin Laden?  Wonder no longer!  This book talks at length about his family and its origins.

Stones into schools - Greg Mortenson

•  The author was revealed to have exaggerated/falsified his stories and was ordered to repay money to his charity, but the stories about establishing schools in Afghanistan still resonate strongly.

 The Promised land:  settling the west 1896-1914 - Pierre Burton

• The legendary Canadian author describes the settling of Canada's west with a series of stories about Canadians of all walks of life.

The Coming global superstorm - Art Bell

• When the stresses on the Earth are all released at once, what will happen?  According to this book, a storm of epic proportions!

Anyway, the ENF collection should be interesting, so please keep an eye out for it!

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.