On Weeding

Christopher Fluetsch

California Department of Education. (n.d.) Weeding the school library. Retrieved from http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/lb/documents/weedingbrochure.pdf

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. (2013). Collection development. Retrieved from http://www.library.illinois.edu/uni/policies/collectiondevelopment.html

I find that one of the more difficult parts of collection management is weeding. As with all libraries, my shelf space is limited. My school library has grown over many years, and some of the books on our shelves are obsolete, inaccurate or damaged. Despite this, I have a hard time bringing myself to weed.

There are two basic reasons. First, I seem to be constitutionally incapable of getting rid of a book. My home library is quite large. I have boxes of comic books. I have multiple copies of old role-playing game rule books. I like books, and I hate to get rid of them.

Second, it can be difficult for me to determine if a book in the school library ought to be weeded. I always find myself thinking, “What is a student decides to research this, and I’ve gotten rid of the last copy.” Or, “Sure, no one has checked out this book in a decade, but I enjoyed it when I was a child. Perhaps someone will come along and discover it.” Additionally, I am concerned about violating some obscure library protection law.

The two documents listed above will be extremely useful to me, because they address this last issue. The first document is from the California Department of Education. It provides official guidelines approved by the CDE. These include specific age guidelines, best-practice procedures to adopt and even a helpful mnemonic. In addition to its practical aspects, the document provides me with CYA cover should anyone question my weeding procedures.

The University of Illinois document offers additional guidelines. Though more appropriate for universities, these guidelines reinforce many of the things discussed in the CDE flyer. Some specifically helpful aspects are lists of reasons to weed, lists of quickly outdated materials and directions about eliminating extra volumes of a particular work.

If, like me, you are not fully comfortable with the process of weeding, I highly recommend these two documents. They are short, easy to understand and extremely useful.