Weeding Guidelines

Hello,
Today I will be tackling the difficult subject of weeding in the library. No matter what size your library is, you must periodically weed out books that are no longer useful. This can be a problem in most schools. Parents, church members, or even other teachers might criticize when you throw away books. Comments you may get are, “Why are you throwing away perfectly good books?” or “You ask for money for books, then you go and throw them away!” The best response is to have specific guidelines for this procedure that you can refer to as to WHY this book or that book has been discarded. Here are some guidelines that will be a good starting place for you.
General guidelines for weeding:
1. Information in the book is outdated, inaccurate, false information or obsolete. Imagine having a book on space travel written in 1960! Things have changed drastically since then.
2. Mediocre writing style or repetitious series– you likely have books in your library that were churned out to meet a popular interest which has passed and is not longer popular. Some of these may still be popular with your students, but if no one reads them and you cannot generate interest in them, they are taking up valuable real estate on your library shelves.
3. Material containing biased, racist, or sexist views or terminology. These don’t need to be kept for ‘historical purposes’. This kind of thinking is wrong. Is this what you want your students to learn? If not, then get rid of it.
4. Unused sets of books. Check these carefully to make sure they are useful to your school. If they aren’t something that you need, and they fit one in criteria #1 above, toss them out.
5. Duplicate books – if you have more than one copy of a book, consider if it is needed or not. If not, then get rid of the duplicate.
6. Superseded editions – it is usually not necessary to keep older editions if you have the newer one. Keep in mind that if your library is using all editions, then by all means keep them.
7. Weed out any material is worn out, ragged, shabby, dirty, warped, bug-infested, marked up, mutilated, missing pages, poor quality pictures or illustrations, or ‘edited’ by patrons.
8. Has the book been sitting on the shelf without circulating? Maybe it is no longer useful.
The guidelines above are just that - guidelines. It may be that you discard a book, while another school chooses to keep the same title. It will depend on your school and your particular needs. If you are having a difficult time with the idea of throwing away ‘good books’, keep in mind that you are improving your library and making it the best place for your children to study and learn. How can we do this with old, useless information?
Discard Process
Books may need to be discarded in a particular way. Delete them from the computer or shelf list if you have one. Black out the school name, spine label, and any other information that may bring the lost sheep home once it leaves. If you truly will be criticized heavily for removing them from shelves, put them in a black trash bag, drive to another town, and find a dumpster.
If you have older books that are in good condition that aren’t circulating, try a trick I sometimes use. Pull a student aside and ask them in a confidential way if they would be willing to help you with a problem. Give them the book and ask them to read it and let you know if they think it is a good choice for the library or if they think it should be discarded. Most students are willing to do this. I have also pulled out a shelf of books that look like they might need to be discarded and asked a class or two of students to help me decide if these books are worthy of shelf space.
I also have designated a shelf and titled it “Lonely Books: Please Read Us”. Then I do my best to sell these to the students.
What do you do with discarded books? If they are in truly deplorable condition, find a dumpster and dump. If they are in decent reading condition, I put them on a ‘Sale’ shelf and sell them for a quarter each. Parents even come in a check the sale shelf for books. It puts a little bit of money in the library kitty. You may have a better idea of what to do with discarded books.
If after all this you STILL have reservations about weeding in your library, tell me and I will come there myself and weed! Well, I probably won’t, but I hope you will see the importance of improving your library and making it the best it can be.
Last school year I discussed weeding in specific Dewey Decimal Classification areas and we went from the 100’s into the 500’s. If you weren’t a part of the email list or if you want to be reminded of what kinds of things to weed in those Dewey Decimal Classifications, you can check my blog at sdalibrarian.blogspot.com for that information.
Have a great week,
Audrey