Collection Reflection

There have recently been some big changes at my city library system. As of this week, seven of our branches will be open almost twice as many hours, and two branches will be closed. One, a one-room branch, is currently being  re-purposed by the city  as a Senior Center. The other will reopen in 2014, with much of its collection gone, as an " Express Library ." This Friday, all hands available will head up to the latter branch to pack away the items that our collection development head determined will stay, making room for the renovation process. In the case of a branch closing, thousands of library items have to go somewhere! Last year, we closed branches because of budget shortfalls and then reopened them months later. In the hope that funding would eventually be found, their collections were left mostly intact, although we did some weeding before they reopened. The ideal conditions under which to weed an entire library's collection quickly, in my opinion, include a cl...

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...