An Ugly Weed: innovative Deselection to Address a Shelf Space Crisis

Betty Decker

Arbeeny, P., & Chittenden, L. (2014). An ugly weed: Innovative deselection to address a shelf space crisis. Journal of Library Innovation, 5(1), 78-90. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=llf&AN=96169959&site=ehost-live

Summary: In 2011 the John F. Reed Library at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado was at shelf capacity. This overcrowding was due to a lack of staff maintaining the weeding and the loss of space to create a commons area for students. To alleviate shelf space, a weeding project would need to be implemented. Two librarians were tasked with selecting 4,000-5,000 titles for removal. The list of titles for deselection would need to be provided to subject liaison librarians within a short time. Due to this time shortage it was decided that the librarians would look at the items located in basement storage. Using the library’s ILS the librarians were able to create a list of 20,974 titles that had not checked out since 2003. This list included several fields that had been added to the MARC records that stated if the title was a core title, core author, or if the recorded included notes from the librarian. Once the librarians created an Excel spreadsheet, they quickly selected duplicate titles that had duplicates for removal. These titles were then removed from the shelf by student workers. Multi-volume sets were removed from the list as the librarians were performing a quick weed and felt it would be more productive to have faculty input when considering deselecting these large sets. From these initial removals the librarians then moved towards deselecting titles that were no longer part of the curriculum at the college.  The librarians were also able to then begin narrowing the list down by performing keyword searches in combination with age of material.

The librarians were able to narrow the initial list down to 3,900 titles that were provided to the subject liaison librarians. The subject liaison librarians were then able to direct student workers to remove titles by shelf and set aside for evaluation. In all, a total of 3,734 titles were deselected. The Fort Lewis College Library normal weeding program allows for each subject liaison librarian to deselect titles from their area throughout the year. This process allowed each librarian to not be overloaded with the deselection of titles as well as other duties. The reason for the need to quickly weed titles was due in part to a loss of two librarians which allowed the collection to grow unfettered. The library felt that though this process was workable and allowed for a selection of titles to be removed quickly, it did monopolize the time of the two librarians responsible for creating the list.           

Evaluation: I agree with the Fort Lewis College Library; though this was a great process to quickly weed titles it is not conducive to continual use. Their original weeding process of allowing the subject liaison librarians to weed during the year was more conducive than this process. If I should find myself with the responsibility for a collection that has not been weeded in many years, if ever, then this would be an acceptable weeding process to use. Converting the list of titles into an Excel spreadsheet allowed for titles to be quickly evaluated by age, keyword, duplication or subject area. This obviously narrows down greatly the time used to evaluate each individual title, especially if, like the College, you would be removing most of a subject area that is no longer part of the curriculum.  Overall I love the ease of using Excel, but still feel that this was a patch to be used if ever overcrowding is imminent.