To Weed or Not to Weed?

Lederer, Haylee

Ford, D. B. (2015). To Weed or Not to Weed?. School Library Journal, 61(8), 13.

Summary: This article calls for more analysis of school library's non-fiction collection. The author, Deborah Ford, states, "Collection development is more than buying new books. Continuous pruning, updating, and evaluation is required if our libraries are to remain viable resources" (pg. 13). She argues that in order to remain current and relevant, school libraries must offer a current and relevant selection; therefore, the collection must be weeded often. Ford offers up a way to make this possible: the CREW (Continuous Review, Evaluation, and Weeding) method (pg. 13). This method looks at the publication date, the physical condition of the book, and the date it was last checked out.

Evaluation: I was really interested in this article for two reasons: I'm currently in INFO 210 (Reference Services), and we've been talking about how weeding is actually becoming more important than obtaining materials, which I thought was interesting. Also, I work as an elementary school librarian, so getting my library up to common core standards has been a challenge! This article was really short, but I liked that, because it was straight to the point. I find it is often hard to decide when a book is no longer relevant to my collection, but Ford offers a simple and easy to use method to help librarians. As a new librarian, I found this article extremely helpful in quickly outlining how to provide the best collection. I also found it extremely necessary in today's environment. Common core requires librarians and teachers to focus more on non-fiction - this makes it even more necessary for our non-fiction to be up to date.