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...

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...

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...

If you are responsible for collection development in just about any size or kind of library, the chances are good that there's been a recent push to reduce the size of your print reference collection.* Print reference materials are, to use a regional expression, wicked expensive. They are also being used less and less as librarians turn to databases and patrons turn to the immediate gratification of the internet. As budgets decline and libraries look to use their space in new and creative ways, physical reference collections are obvious targets for heavy weeding. Here at my library, we are reducing our reference collection by 50%. At our branches, reference collections will be cut by 75% . . . this time around. So where do you start when you are lucky enough to get the assignment to chop chop chop? Before You Begin Get a firm idea of how much the administration wants to reduce the reference collection. Survey the collection and determine how much you're going to have to weed...

Today's guest post comes to us from that rare breed (around here): an academic librarian. ____ This may be the understatement of the month (and in the running for understatement of the year), but collection development works a little differently at college and university libraries than it does at public libraries. In some ways, the library where I work has a foot in both camps, since we’re semi-rural and miles away from the nearest public library. This dichotomy is especially obvious when you examine one part of the Hiram College Library I manage: the children’s literature collection. Being in charge of our kid lit section presents a lot of challenges, but the biggest one is that the collection has to serve multiple masters. Master #1: It needs to be appealing to school-aged children. There’s been a lot of faculty turnover recently – due to retirement, mostly – so quite a few of our professors have young families. Master #2: It needs to be appealing to our students...

I've been weeding the fiction paperbacks in my collection. Part of this includes looking for missing items so that I can get a better picture of what is actually on the shelf and what might need to be replaced. Yesterday, I generated a list of missing books for the Science Fiction and Fantasy paperbacks (a collection with 1,000 items). There were 131 books on my list, which included Claims Returned items as well as those In Transit--you'd be surprised how many items have been in transit for years, at which point they're effectively gone from the collection--as well as In Process and Missing items. I found 30 of the missing books on the shelf where they were supposed to be, which was a relief because it means that I don't have to worry about reordering any of them, but also a cause for concern because there aren't that many books in the SF/F collection, and somehow the people pulling holds aren't finding them on the shelf. That left 101 books still missing. M...

A while ago, I started a project to relieve some of the pressure on the mass market paperback shelves by identifying potential candidates for weeding. I found some surprising results, primarily having to do with what books were actually on the shelves. Here is a description of my work with the Fiction paperbacks--those items not classified Science Fiction, Fantasy, Romance, Urban Fiction, Mystery, Horror, Nonfiction, or Western. This catch-all section includes thrillers, literary fiction, classics, Men's Adventure, "chick lit," books featuring African-American characters that aren't cataloged in either the Romance or Urban Fiction sections, and so on. Some of the big names are Dan Brown, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Fern Michaels, James Patterson, Nora Roberts, and Danielle Steel. Almost all of the Tall Premium editions that we own can be found there, making my life difficult. I ran a report on the entire paperback collection to generate the statistics I would need (s...

In an earlier post , I suggested that perhaps writing about my intention to weed some parts of the library's collection would force me into action, and I am pleased to report that it has finally done so! The good news is that I was able to weed some items that were no longer being used by my library's service population, making room for new books that I've been ordering in the normal course of collection development. The bad news is that it took me more than two hours to find fewer than 50 books that I thought might be weedable and remove some of them from the collection. Considering that I only got through a few shelves (of the hundreds that await my careful attention in the 800-830 range), this is somewhat depressing. My goal was to evaluate and discard a manageable chunk of books. The steps were as follows: 1. Using my most recent export of statistics for the 12,000 books in that part of the collection, I created a subset of books with zero circulations in the past 1...

I was denewing books in the 800s recently, which gives me the opportunity to see how books on the "New" shelf have circulated in the 10-12 months between when they're processed and when they're put in the general collection. These books are featured in a very public area and theoretically have a greater chance of being noticed by patrons and checked out. I've been aware for a while now that books of poetry, while dear to my heart, don't enjoy much popularity at my library, even though they are featured on displays (as for National Poetry Month) and given the same time as other books in the New section. Most of the poetry collections I denewed the other day had circulated, but sometimes as little as one time. Is one circulation a victory? If a book costs a certain amount (after a library discount), and then we add the cost of paying people to process and shelve it, does one circulation make its purchase worthwhile? At what point does the balance swing in fa...

As a follow-up to my post about statistics last week, I thought I would take a closer look at one of my nonfiction sections to demonstrate the kind of information that a report can yield. The Dewey range from 800 through 829 was my first assignment at this library; it covers American and English literature (poetry, essays, speeches, criticism, how-to, humor, drama). It's a grab-bag of exciting treasures, including Chaucer, guides to writing your first screenplay, the collected poems of Maya Angelou, collections of erotica, Dave Barry, Shakespeare, works about (but not by) Jane Austen, and Beowulf . At my library, this part of the collection includes nearly 12,000 items, and they are all under my jurisdiction. I was originally assigned collection development of this section because of my Master's degree in English literature, which at least provided me with some background in the area. Over the years, I've gotten familiar with the collection and what's popular. And, I c...

As usual, I need to weed my parts of the nonfiction collection. I could weed based on condition, which would allow me to clear a little space by pulling books off the shelf that clearly shouldn't be there because they're falling apart, or hideously ugly, or both. But what I really need is to make enough space on the shelves for the new books I've been buying over the past (cough) undisclosed period of time since I last really weeded, which means that I have to get serious. For that, I want a report. I suspect that I care about statistics more than a lot of my colleagues. We do use statistics regularly during the course of our jobs; as reference librarians, we keep a daily record of our interactions with patrons, rather than recording stats once a month or once a year and extrapolating. Even so, I don't think many of my co-workers run reports as regularly as I do or are as familiar with the reporting software. Does this make me a stat-crazed librarian? I'm ...

This post is part of the larger Library Day in the Life project--I thought it would be fun for Collection Reflection to participate. Because I work with the public, I never actually get to spend an entire day doing collection development, so I'm going to describe the bits and pieces that got done over the course of this week in the midst of desk time, class preparation and teaching, and whatnot. My library's collection budget has been cut to the state minimum requirement (as selectors, we haven't yet been told how this will play out, only that it's very bad) and has not yet been finalized. Therefore, we have been preparing carts for the last month or two without knowing when the items will be ordered. What this means is that books I have selected, some of which have subsequently appeared on bestseller lists, are not yet available to patrons. However, the selection process--like the show--must go on. I am hoping that the books I've selected will still be in dema...

Let's talk about weeding, shall we? I'm really interested in how YOU do it. I want to hear all the gory details. Spill it. Let me tell how it would work here, if it was a perfect world: A librarian would gather their books together, CHECK THE DATABASE/CATALOG , take into account more than just what is happening at your particular branch, make a decision. Gather books together : Doesn't mean you have to gather a cart full of books. It doesn't mean you have to finish one section before you start another. Do what is convenient! If FIC is tight in the V's (as if) then do that section. If the 641.5's need room RIGHT NOW, do that. MYS, SF, etc. Do what needs to be done. If you have time to go from A to Z in fiction you're lucky. Check the database/Catalog & Take the entire system into account : These go together and we fall down here. Lately, some librarians have fallen into the habit of seeing multiple copies of books and just discarding until they get...