I started at a K-7 school last year. It didn't look like the previous librarians
had thrown anything away - ever! With the aide's assistance (she has been there 20
years - but only has 8 hours per week) we started weeding... Easily 40% of our
collection fits the criteria for weeding; except for the reference & Easy sections
which have now been completed.
This was my first year in the library and it looked as if weeding hadn't
been done in a while. I got rid of 10 full boxes of books that had old
copyright dates and inaccurate information. . . I would say I got rid of 30%. I
need to weed some more though.
When I moved to a new building last year, the district hoped to save
money by having me bring all the "gently-used," newer books with me. I
went through the collection at least 4 times, and ended up weeding over
half of the books.
The first year I was here I weeded the fiction collection and easily
50% was pulled from the shelves. Even today just with the paperback
fiction, I weed 25 to 30% every year to keep it current and
circulating.
. . .The library went from having all the shelves crammed with books to having
shelves no more than 1/2 to 3/4 full with periodic empty shelves so that students
can use them to lay out books to look at. . . And I do have statistics to show that
the library circulation has grown over the years. Students trust that the library
will have great (and attractive books), many of which will be within 1 - 7 years
old.
Last spring the newspaper published an article about the school libraries in our
area. This got attention. So, I've been promised lots of money to bring our
library up-to-date. The school hired Karen Lowe to come in and do a collection
analysis. The average age of our collection was 1976. The assistant and our
parent volunteers have been weeding like mad. I can't tell you how many boxes of
books have been shipped out of here. We went from over 12k volumes to 8k. That
includes all the books we have weeded plus the 24k I've spent on books. I'm sure
we have weeded over 50%. We left about nothing in non-fiction.
Ten years ago I came into an elementary library with a badly dated
collection. The median age was about 1970. I used the ALA guidelines
and easily discarded 40 to 50% of the collection in some areas.
When I first took my current job, I started automating the library. I easily
weeded 40-50% of the collection.
Yes, I have weeded that many books from the media center in one year. The immediate
effect was the kids asked if I had gotten new books. No, I hadn't, the old stuff
made it hard to find the new stuff. I had PTO donate money to the library for
targeted areas. I have my circulation way up because kids can find things they want
to read. I brought my average collection age from the 1980's and 1970's up in to
the 1990's. I could actually see where I needed to get materials.
. . . I weeded as time allowed, which meant I weeded about 3,000 books a
year from each collection (2 collections), with about a total of 10,000 items from
each library. Hardly anyone noticed. Circulation increased.
This past year I moved to a new school (so I didn't have such a long commute) and
started all over again. I guess I'm bolder, and will have weeded about 10,000 items
this year alone. Again it was following librarians who never weeded for the past 22
year...
About ten years ago, I was part of a team of three media specialists at DeLand High
School in Florida and we did a heavy weeding of the collection. The school was 25
years old at that time. Overall we made a 50% reduction of the fiction section,
with selected heavy weeding of non-fiction sections.
I moved into an elem library with 15K books and weeded down to 10K in
the first year. . . Circ went way up, teachers and principal liked the openness,
kids liked that it was easier to find the good stuff.
I moved into a MS library a bit newer, but also not well weeded
(recently moved from 7-9 to 6-8). Maybe 20% tossed in first year and
half.
I have been at three schools where it had not been weeded in many
years and we threw out THOUSANDS of books. In each case it was
probably 1/4 to 1/3 of the collection
I've thrown out 5,000 books in the last 2 years, many of which had been moved to
our building when it opened in 1959!
And yes, I did weed about 30% of one area this year - my 629 shelf. Last year it
was the 520s shelf and the 567(dinosaurs) shelf was about 50%. I also increased my
ancient civilizations materials by about 60%.
I absolutely weeded AT LEAST 30%, probably more, of my collection when I came into
this job. The collection had not been weeded since the school opened in 1978 (with
lots of books brought over from the 4 schools that consolidated STILL in the
collection when I arrived in 1998). I tossed and tossed. . .
This is my sixth year and working on weeding again. I've weeded at least a couple
hundred that I missed the first time around. I recently weeded about 1/3 of my
biography section.
I didn't weed 50% but I did weed over 20% of my collection. Of a
collection of about 6000 titles, I took out well over 1000. Some of
these had copyrights as old as 1930. The average age of the weeded books
was 1967, including some titles like I want to be a computer operator,
showing a picture of a huge main frame computer from the sixties.
12 years ago, when I first came to my middle school. I removed 3000 of 12,000
volumes. Since then my inventory stays just over to just under 10,000, so with
purchases every year you can see that I continue to weed.
Funny, I just had this conversation at a meeting of area librarians yesterday. I
inherited a library that admittedly had never been weeded, and the media specialist
had been there 27 years. He "didn't like to throw away books" and so he didn't.
Last summer, when I weeded the 500s, I got rid of 63% of the books in the
collection. This summer is 000-399, and I expect the numebers to be the same or
higher. The last media specialist said to me when showing me around that when I was
finished weeding, I'd probably have less than half of the books left, and I think
he's going to be right.
Renee Choe-Winter
Media Specialist
Benton Community MS/HS
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