Weeding Your Library

Hello,

If you need to do a quick weeding in your library, start with these criteria.

1. Weed out books that are torn, taped, yellowed, missing pages, damaged in some way, or dilapidated.

2. Look at the old books. Weed out those that aren’t useful to your library. Think about weeding books that were written for adults. Look at each and ask yourself if you are interested in that book and would your students want to grab it to use. Is it appropriate for your curriculum? Can you get another newer better copy that would actually be used? Decide if it is shelf-worthy.

3. E. G. White books – do you need multiples of each copy? Have they been donated to you? Consider keeping one of each copy that you feel is needed for school purposes. Fill in any missing copies that are needed. Donate others to the church library. If you need multiple copies, then keep what will be used and is needed.

4. Check the paperbacks. How beat up are they? Are they being used? Are they shabby, warped, mutilated, marked up? If a paperback book is actually being used, but is in poor shape, that is a clue to replace it with a hardcover or better paperback copy.

5. Weed out books with very small print or poor quality pictures.

6. Weed out outdated and obsolete information. Think about technology, science, health, medicine, computers, space. These things change quickly and it is possible that your library needs to weed these out. I usually use Jupiter as a guide. If the book on Jupiter says that Jupiter has 17 moons, that needs to go.

7. Inaccurate or false information. Librarians say that no information is better than wrong information.

8. Duplicate copies. Do you need duplicates of the title? If not, then keep the best one.

9. Encyclopedia – How old is yours? Do you have one? If it is five years old or older, it is outdated. Use an online encyclopedia instead for current information. Some schools like to keep one print encyclopedia to have for basic information and to teach students how to look up information in a book, but they use the internet for any information that might need to be updated.

10. Donated books can be tricky. Is the donor in your community and would they be offended if you weeded the book?

Remember that if a book is something that your students and your patrons use, then feel free to keep it even if it fits into some of the weeding criteria above. You don’t have to get rid of it unless you want to. Some old books may be valuable, so check online at a source such as Amazon.com before putting it in a dumpster. Get a parent to help with this part if you like. Anything you can sell will bring in money to help improve your library.

Have a great week,

Audrey