Ideas for Weeding Your Library

Hello,

Last week I was in Seattle for a conference titled “101 Best Strategies to Increase the Effectiveness of Your School Library Program”. It was a BER (Bureau of Education and Research) seminar. If you have never been to one of these, I urge you to attend one if at all possible. They have wonderful presenters and they are quite entertaining.

Deborah Ford was the presenter for this seminar. I have had the pleasure of attending one of her BER Seminars previously, so I knew this would be good.

She spoke to us about the importance of weeding our libraries and identifying our worst areas. One great idea that I took away was to buy while you weed. When you find a book that is important to your library, but is either too tattered or missing pages, or too old, put it on your list to buy an updated copy.

Since weeding is such a difficult job for most of us, Deb suggests we have a five-year plan. This would take the library in sections to weed and renew titles as needed, instead of trying to do it all at once. That actually makes a lot more sense and isn’t so overwhelming.

Another idea about weeding is to enlist experts for help. For example, it may be hard to know what is worthwhile in the chemistry section. If you teach in a small school, you may have a parent who is a chemist. Why not ask them to come in and check out that section and help you weed it? If you are in a larger school, find the science teacher and ask him or her to go through those sections to evaluate what is worthy of shelf space or not. Put the books on a table to make it easier for them and ask them for 5 – 10 minutes of their time to look them over. This also has the added benefit of letting your science teacher know what resources the library has. Maybe those books will be used a bit more often.

If you are unsure of yourself weeding your library and really don’t know what to weed, check out my blog. Sdalibrarian.blogspot.com. In 2015 I wrote weekly posts beginning in January with a quick weeding criteria, then in March, April, and May with one section at a time. My posts describe the section and what to weed out. Feel free to follow me or at least bookmark the site so you can refer to it as needed. Just so you know, I put on the blog the same thing I post to you each week. It is a place to find all my weekly emails since I began in 2009.

I hope you have a great week.

Audrey