Collection Reflection

One of the areas of my responsibility in the nonfiction collection is the 840s. Officially this is "Literatures of Romance languages"--on a practical level, this translates to "French literature and related stuff." There may have been a time when French poetry, plays, criticism, and novels were incredibly popular at my library, but now is not that time. The average copyright date of items in this section is 1965 (the median and mode are both 1967). The Spanish-language (860s) and Russian-language (890s) sections are both over capacity and much more heavily used at my library, and weeding the 840s will help provide some additional space in that area. The weeding list I am working from encompasses the majority of the items in this part of the collection. So what do you do when you have an area to weed and you could theoretically delete almost every item? I was given responsibility for this area because I have a mild grasp of French and opinions about literature.* A...

Does your library carry books in foreign languages? Not just language learning, but actual text in different languages? Many libraries do and yet, people are often surprised to find books in German, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, etc. on the shelves. We carry books in a variety of languages, from the very popular (Spanish) to the more obscure (Urdu). We have 18 titles in Urdu text, all of which have circulated more than once. We have 247 Korean language books in the collection, many of them new titles, with varying circulation stats. Some have gone out multiple times, some not at all. Because we have a floating collection, we do not have to assign books to certain branches around the city. This is a great thing for foreign language books because we haven't found any good ways to find out, in branch service areas, what languages are most popular. There is anecdata about this part of town being heavy with Russian speakers, and that part of town having lots of Chinese speakers. Spanis...