The Need to Weed

I've been doing a lot of weeding at my Library. It is very small and we are bursting at the seams so I'm weeding. There's a real misconception about weeding and libraries. I've known of faculty who complain that we're throwing out perfectly good books but we aren't! We're throwing out books that are absolutely no use to anyone!

When I was the Collection Development Librarian at another job, I instigated a weeding project to rid the library of law books. Our library was small and campus enrollment was growing. As lawyers moved to online databases, they would donate their law libraries to us. Unfortunately, that became a real problem because we had every law book ever published and nobody ever checked them out. They sat on the shelves taking up over a twelfth of all the shelves in the library. We needed that space to support our new programs so we weeded the books. I don't know if any of you have ever looked at a law book but they are boring. They are word for word recordings of cases and what the outcomes were. Anyone who has ever sat on a jury or been involved in a court case knows how tedious the proceedings can be and law books are a record of all of that! What I find really interesting though, is there are people out there who want the law books, not to read but to turn into purses and safes for valuables.

Just so you know that weeding is not something that happens only in academic libraries, here is one a favorite library blog, Awful Library Books. It's all about the need to weed in libraries. Take some time and check out some of those books. I'm sure you'll agree, they needed to go!