Weeding the collection -- part one

Some of you have seen me in the stacks with a book truck, spending hours doing some mysterious task.  We are undertaking a weeding project aimed first at the most overcrowded portions of the collection.  We do this on a 10-year cycle.

When we start removing things from the collection, people get a little anxious.  They are sure that we will somehow zero in on the books they like best and get rid of them!  I can assure you that this is very unlikely to happen.  We use a set of assessment criteria that I will explain in a series of blog posts, to let you know exactly how we are going about it.

For starters, let me identify the three groups of things most often removed :

1)  Excess copies.  The Library may buy several copies of a certain book to facilitate circulation & access.  But years later, that book may be seldom used, as times change and new materials come along that are of current interest.  If we own three or four copies (or more!) of a book and none of them has been borrowed in the past five years, probably that is way too many.  Two copies will probably suffice.  We will keep the ones in the best condition and remove the rest.  There are exceptions to this rule: e.g., works published by our own faculty or books that are scarce and would be difficult to replace.

2)  Old college textbooks and "how to" manuals.  We have on our shelves an embarrassing array of introductions intended for undergraduate college courses in communications, sociology, education, etc.  These were never germane to our collection, but especially so when they are 35-40 years out of date.  We also have many "how to" guides that were once helpful but are now absurdly dated, such as The Church Library Handbook from 1972, or Using Computers in the Classroom from 1995.  We actually do keep a few of these to document the changes in technology over time.  But the rest of them are unlikely to be missed.

3)  Books in terminal condition.  Books that have reached the end of their physical life span are assessed.  Some that are still in demand -- such as the novels of CS Lewis -- are replaced with new copies.  We also check to see whether the title is readily available nearby through ILL or consortium borrowing.  Often, we find that books now in the public domain are available in free digital versions online, through Google Books or the Hathi Trust.  If the item belongs to the core collecting categories of our collection -- Reformation theology, for example, or biblical exegesis -- we check to see if it is still in print or if we can replace it with a used copy in better condition.

In following posts, I'll be more specific about the process of grooming a research collection.  If we do it well, we'll have a stronger, better collection with growth space for a few more years to come.

Paula