Unfortunately, library weeding gets a bad reputation, thanks in part to weeding horror stories. In 2013 Highland Park (MI) High School was accused of throwing out a large collection of history materials, including some rare items, which had been cultivated over a fifty-year period. (Highland Park’s emergency manager says the collection was thrown out by mistake.) Also in 2013, The Urbana (IL) Free Library discarded nearly 10,000 items, apparently just based on age, rather than condition or use. The discarding was done at the director’s command—while the head of adult services was on vacation. (The now-former director stated that the ten years was only the report benchmark and that books were individually evaluated.) While it’s hard to find anything good in this story, it should be noted that the library is undertaking a large-scale RFID project, and that is absolutely the time to undergo a massive weed. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t appear to be a carefully planned process. 2014 saw news stories from school libraries in Racine (WI) and Boston (MA). The media in Chattanooga, (TN) had a field day interviewing the former library director, who was more conservative about weeding, after the new director weeded almost half the collection over two years. Patrons in Albany County, California, formed their own protest group when they noticed that most of the shelves in their branch libraries were suddenly only half-full.
What usually happens is that a disgruntled (sometimes justifiably so) staff member sets off the alarm to the public about what’s happening behind closed stacks. Or worse, a patron spies a Dumpster full of discarded material and immediately jumps to the conclusion that the library is enacting a modern-day book burning. Employees who do not feel their concerns are being heard or their professional opinions are being considered may decide they have no choice other than to become a whistle-blowers. Patrons who do not understand the selection or weeding process are understandably alarmed when they see a mass number of items removed from their local library.
It pains me to read about these “bad weeds” for a number of reasons. First and foremost, because I’ve been there—on the dark side. As I shared in the introduction, in 2001, while working for the Chicago Public Library, I was accused by a local politician of destroying books while working on a massive and much-needed weeding project at one of the regional branches. I was part of a team whose members were experienced in collections, and we had a plan to move, replace, and discard a large amount of material—but, unfortunately, that plan did not include communicating with the public to let them know what was going to happen. Nor did we do a very good job of communicating with the branch staff, who felt that they were being pushed aside by a group of outsiders. The experience really opened my eyes to the need for an open path of communication and the need for staff buy-in. Lucky for me, I have also worked on weeding projects that went very smoothly, even when working with high numbers of books.
I also hate to hear these bad weeding stories because they raise the hackles of patrons, taxpayers, and book lovers everywhere, and lead them to believe that weeding is never a good thing. Hearing such horror stories tends to bring on the knee-jerk reaction that no book should ever, ever be discarded, which simply isn’t feasible. And, finally, these stories are painful because they illustrate that there are still plenty of librarians and administrators who do not understand the fundamentals of weeding.
Ideally, a library wouldn’t need to perform such drastic weeding projects. If a collection is weeded on a regular basis, a section at a time, and maintained well with new materials, it rarely requires a large, hard-to-ignore weed. When a major project is needed, it should be planned out carefully, and communication is a key part of that planning. It’s not particularly difficult to get the message out to your staff and patrons.
If a large weeding project is planned, the word should get out before the work commences. The director should make a statement on the library’s website, in the library newsletter, or to the local press. Take command of the situation rather than let speculation or rumors take hold. The general reasons for weeding should be discussed, as should some details about how the project will work and impact patrons (i.e., patrons may notice empty ranges while the evaluation process is going on; patrons should expect to see replacements coming in X weeks, etc.). It’s important for everyone to keep in mind that weeding isn’t always about ridding the shelves—sometimes it’s about getting fresh new copies of the exact same titles.
In the case of ongoing weeding, there doesn’t need to be a formal announcement, but staff should be prepared to answer questions from curious patrons (“Why are half the Graphic Novels missing from the shelf?” “I’m sorry for the inconvenience! We’ve pulled that section and it’s currently on a book cart in the workroom while we check how much use the books get and search for new ones to add to the collection. Is there something I can grab for you?”)
In either case, staff should use positive terms instead of negatives when talking about weeding and should never complain to patrons about the bad materials that were on the shelf. (The Cart of Shame should be an inside joke, unless you need to use it to prove a point!) Instead, they can explain that the library is making room for new materials, making the shelves easier to navigate, and replacing outdated information with current information.
The way you dispose of discarded material will also have an impact on how the public reacts. (See page 10 for more detail on what to do with discards.) If the public knows that material is being reused or recycled, they may feel better about the weeding process overall. If materials need to be thrown in the trash, the library director needs to make a statement regarding the types of materials that are being thrown away (outdated medical, law, books in unsalvageable condition, etc. are good examples to use here), so that everyone is clear that “perfectly good books” aren’t being destroyed.
The Milwaukee School of Engineering has a page on their website devoted to the topic of weeding at the library (www.msoe.edu/community/campus-life/library/page/2012/book-weeding). One of the best parts of this page is that it includes the following language:
WHAT IF YOU SEE A BOOK THAT YOU DO NOT FEEL SHOULD BE WEEDED?
Tell us! Stop by the library and talk with one of the librarians or send us an email!
Because of the many factors that are implicated in the decision to remove a book, each case is different. However, the library staff will seriously consider the wishes of all members of the MSOE faculty, staff, or student body who inform us that the book should remain in the library collection!
To repeat, no book will be permanently removed while it is a candidate for removal. Books will only be permanently removed after the MSOE Community has had a sufficient opportunity to comment on the lists of candidates for removal.
In addition, the page describes, in very simple terms, the general guidelines that staff use for weeding:
CRITERIA FOR SELECTING BOOK WEEDING CANDIDATES
In deciding whether or not a book is a candidate for weeding, the MSOE Library staff attempt to answer the following questions:
• Is the book’s content outdated or largely outdated?
• What do members of the faculty say? Do members of the faculty recommend that the book be kept?
• What do members of the staff say? Do staff members recommend that the book be kept?
• What do students say? Do members of the student body recommend that the book be kept?
• How many times has the book circulated? Has it circulated within the last five years?
• Is the book irrelevant to the needs and interests of customers?
• Has the book been superseded by something else? Has a subsequent edition been added? Is there a better book that should be obtained instead?
• Is the book physically damaged and beyond repair?
• Can selected books be obtained easily and quickly through Interlibrary Loan?
• Is the book requested by other libraries via Interlibrary Loan?
• Is the book considered a “classic” contribution to the field (and therefore, it would be retained)?
• Is the book a second copy? Are there good reasons to retain multiple copies of a book? (e.g., class readings, etc.). Other questions may also be investigated.
Even better? The site offers links to PDFs of lists of weeded items. Talk about complete transparency—I’m in awe. Putting statements like that out to the public can really help patrons understand that weeding does not happen in a vacuum, and that it is a necessary task. Weeding is not a mechanical process. There is emotion involved, there is thought involved, and it takes the same amount of skill to build a collection as it does to cull one. Successful projects will include keeping the staff and the patrons informed to help avoid speculation and negative assumptions.
These stories come from a “Weeding Tips” article on Booklist Online, published June 17, 2013 (www.booklistonline.com/Weeding-Tips-Tales-from-the-Front-Rebecca-Vnuk/pid=6240597).
Everyone seems to have a weeding horror story, and several librarians have shared theirs with me. Read on, and see if you can relate—or feel a sense of relief that perhaps your weeding experience wasn’t so bad!
While working in a large academic library, I chose to weed the law books in the circulating collection. Over 75 percent were outdated, and they were discarded. We never had a single complaint about such a huge weed—it appeared that no one ever missed them!
I happened to open a book one day and pulled out the date-due card. It looked heavily foxed, indicating it was ancient—only to find that the bottom of the card was pristine white. I decided to have a look at some more books and found the same issue. So I asked a long-term employee when the collection had last been weeded, and she said never. I went into my office and drafted a one-page set of weeding principles. I presented it to my city manager and explained that it was time to rotate the stock. He said OK, and we pulled a substantial chunk of the collection, including a mass of hopelessly outdated nonfiction.
In my high-school library, we began the process of weeding books from the shelves that had collected years and years of dust from lack of use. Some of the books were dated to the early 1900s! As we began the process, we noticed some books looked chewed on. We just assumed that having been on the shelves for so long, they had deteriorated. However, one day, when we were working on the same shelf, from opposite ends, I removed a book from the shelf and in front of my eyes was this tiny little mouse. I am not sure if I was more frightened than it was—but I would say that I jumped a few feet in total fear. The mouse took off in the opposite direction. My coworker took over the job for me.
When we moved into our new library, the city seemed content to finance only bricks and mortar. To wheedle city funds, I looked for evidence we needed new books. I found an armload of travel guides to countries that no longer existed (Ceylon, Rhodesia, Belgian Congo) and career books in which illustrations pictured only males in plum jobs. In my hunt, I passed a droopy unabridged dictionary on the reference desk. It was published four decades past. We didn’t bother rebinding—it went to the trash.
I weeded the 800s last year and lost track of the number of volumes I pulled that were original to the building’s construction in 1902. Tiny, tiny books that had been library bound, full of onionskin paper and those peculiar ownership stamps that look like punches. I’m not exaggerating when I say that out of the 50 percent of the existing items I weeded, fully half were more than 100 years old, full of insects and dry rot.
A few years ago, I weeded the 600s in a medium-size suburban library and pulled off a gem called How to Raise Your Mongoloid Child, copyright 1954. I regret to this very day that I didn’t take a picture of if before I threw it out. [Author’s note: As mentioned in chapter 1, I have also discarded a similar book, sad to say.]
When I was weeding a school-media collection, I decided that my criteria for nonfiction would be that if any book had a copyright older than my mother-in-law, it was going to be tossed—including the astronomy book that said, “One day, man will walk on the moon.” Problem was, that left me with almost no books.
One of my very first projects was a massive purge at a remote storage facility. Imagine a block-wide building filled with books of every description, and running around the perimeter were high shelves packed with fiction from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. A coworker and I quickly reduced that collection—on the fly, as it were—by at least 80 percent. It was a bloodbath. We were Huns. My own reading tastes are a little perverse when it comes to interesting old books, and I’m as likely to be reading that trendy best-seller from 1913 as the one from 2013, so this was a trial by fire. Our liberal-arts educations got quite a workout, and on the whole, I think we did a fairly good job. And, of course, much of the stuff we were getting rid of was precisely the kind of public-domain titles now glutting e-readers, something even I with my oh-so-space-age RocketBook didn’t envision back then. But, still, sometimes I reflect on what an utterly satisfactory and highly original reading lifetime I could pass among a library comprised of just one day’s weeding during that project.
Tech Services thought we had a good way to weed old editions of standing orders. When a new edition came out, we’d put in a slip that indicated the old edition should go to our department for withdrawal, carefully indicating the bar code of the edition to withdraw. The books would then be switched when being shelved. Well, we stopped that practice when we found the current edition had sometimes been sent back with the withdrawal slip in it. We’re pretty positive a new edition of a very expensive reference book actually got withdrawn and recycled and another one was on the way to the recycling bin when it was caught and we were able to salvage it.