Collection Reflection

At my library, there are nonfiction sections under my purview that are, to put it kindly, overly well-stocked. Unfortunately, many of the books in these sections are at least twenty years old and are not being checked out by patrons. I don't have any good "before" pictures, but will say that unfortunately the shelves were full to the point where bookends were rendered unnecessary. Way, way worse than the "before" pictures in my denewing post . A little while ago, I got fed up with the condition of the martial arts books (wildly out of order as well as overflowing) and decided to take action. I knew that the books in the sections adjacent to martial arts in the 790s were full of weeding candidates, so rather than generate a list and pull specific titles, I just started pulling off a shelf of books at a time to analyze them, put them in the correct order, and weed weed WEED. Advantages: Being able to see a selection of the library's holdings for a part...

Yesterday, I was casting about for a reasonable weeding project--one that I could complete within a day or two. I am always conscious of the need to weed in my part of the 800s , which includes more than 13,000 items. Sometimes I even make progress toward this end . Then I remembered that I had been planning to pare down the Shakespeare section, which would allow me to create space and clear out some dead weight. I'm not sure what other large public libraries have for Shakespeare in nonfiction; the section here includes the plays and criticism. (There is also a shelf full of the plays among the YA paperbacks.) For the purposes of this weeding project, I only targeted books with the 822.33 label--yes, Shakespeare has his own call number all to himself! When I started this project, we had nearly 600 items with an 822.33 call number that took up approximately 18 shelves. The average publication date of these items was 1969, and a few of the oldest were from the 1800s. One of the...