Weeding Reflections
Difficulties
I did not find this to be a difficult process for a few reasons. Over the past 3 years I have been informally weeding as I came across books that were damaged. I would pull these books out and replace them. This set-up a situation where I had to mostly look for books that were out dated.
I also had 4 teachers using these books this past year so I was familiar with the section and embarrassed at how dated the materials were. This made it easy for me to weed. One of our course recommendations is to start with a section that you think will be easy until you get the grasp of what you are doing. This practice was applied here.
Finally, after 3 years I feel that I know the users of the library. I know what the students are taking out. The first 2 years I was at the checkout desk watching each check out and this past year I trained students to run the computer. This way I could circulate the library during book exchange and assist/interview students with their exchanges along with keeping an eye on the circulation desk. This gave me a good look at where students are circulating in my library during exchange.
The only difficulty with weeding I have found is not with this course. I found the course has helped. It is a matter of finding time to do it and putting in the effort to get the weeding done. By following the steps, starting easy, and doing a shelf at a time the job can get done.
Connections
In making connections with class I found that using the 10 points from Libe 463 overheads it helped to make this a much easier process then it could have been. There was also a guideline handout sheet that gave suggested ages and circulation numbers for each section of the library. By using these resources it is easy to become more cut throat in deciding what books needed to be weeded. Without those resources there would be more guessing and looking back and forth with Follett reports. Most of the problems in my library are dated ones. The book content and book conditions are generally pretty good because of my informal weeding. There are still books that can be weeded because of their condition and they will be weeded when I come across them.
An outside connection I made when weeding is relating it to social networking. It is much like Facebook. Having a massive collection of “friends” on Facebook is not always a good thing. Much like having a massive collection of books. Most of these friends (books) are not important to your life (collection). When I started deleting these friends I felt a little guilty at first, but then it became much easier each time while I brought my friends list down to a reasonable useful list. Much is the same with weeding, you feel a little guilty at first, but with each book it gets easier and your library becomes healthier.
I also used my professional judgment and decided to keep some books that were technically dated, however I still found them to be useful for the collection of community helpers. This book series has been highly circulated over the years, even when the previous TLs were not recording teacher circulations. This means the students have been reading them. The content in this series was still relevant and the books were set up like a comic book for the photos, so the books themselves did not look dated. One of the points of class was using our professional judgment in making your final decisions.
Process
I found the process to be very helpful. This process felt like practice for what I have to do this fall. By taking on a small shelf it seems to make the task that much less daunting of a job to complete. I just completed the inventory of my library for the first time and there were 13,000 items I had to scan. As I was scanning each item I was getting a feel for the real age of my collection. There are lots of good new books I have bought in my time here, but there is a great deal of dated books that need to go. I feel this process of practicing weeding will help me it making weeding feel like it is a job that can be done.
Conclusion
Overall, this assignment was not a hard one to complete, but I found it to be a very thoughtful and rewarding experience for me. I now feel like I can complete the task of weeding in my library.
The conclusions I came to were that I would not take on the task of weeding over 3 days. I believe I would start to get frustrated. I did 3 days of inventory and I was getting frustrated. I believe I would take on the idea of 1 or 2 shelves per week and start with the easy books. Most likely I’ll start with the fiction section in September.
