Checklist Item 3 - Weeding and Reflection week 2/23 - 2/27

    

Weeding

   This week in the media center I have taken on the task of weeding.  I went to Ms. Peters and told her that I would like to learn to weed a section of our media center and she gladly put me to work.  The first thing we did was to go in to Destiny and run a report on all of the books listed in the section that she wanted me to weed.  She chose section 921 which are biographies.  The report yielded a little over 4,000 books in the section but she informed me that many of the books needed to go.  Ms. Peters advised me to use Karen Lowe’s method of determining which books needed to be taken out of this section and replace.   The inventory report provided me with a list of all the books in the section along with publication dates and the number of times the book has been checked out.  I began with all books published in 1995 and older because we want a current collection dating back twenty years.  I then cross referenced this with books that had 2 or less checkouts since they have been in the library.  

    As I went through the books I performed a physical inspection on the books as taken from the MUSTY method.  I thoroughly went through the books looking for physical condition, relevance to the collection, up to dateness among others to determine if the book was worth keeping.  The most difficult part of the process was pulling books off the shelf that look practically brand new to be thrown away.  I was told this happens a lot with biographies due to the nature of the collection.  Many of the biographies do not circulate much so there is hardly any wear and tear on these books.  In any event, we are taking books out of the collection and replacing them with more modern, popular people.

    The last part of the process is discarding the books.  We removed all of our CMS labels from the books and boxed them up to be thrown away.  I also went into Destiny and removed the books from the collection.  As mentioned earlier, this was the hardest part of the entire task.  My next part will entail finding new books to replace the ones I removed.

Books that have been weeded

My inventory list of the 921 section