Throw it all out!

Presentation available at: http://www2.potsdam.edu/rogersjp/SUNYLA07_weeding, also linked from http://rogersurbanek.wordpress.com

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To Weed, v, from the OED online

• To free (land, a crop, plant) from weeds.
• To remove (weeds) from land, esp. from cultivated land or from a crop.
• To remove (vermin, noxious animals). Obs.
• To eradicate (errors, faults, sins, etc.); to remove (things or persons) as noxious or useless.
• To clear away (plants, not necessarily noxious or useless); to take out (plants or trees) to prevent overcrowding; to thin (a crop).
• To remove (inferior or superfluous individuals) from a company, herd, etc.
• To perform a process of selecting from (a collection of documents, a file, etc.), rejecting those items which are unimportant or not worth retaining; to select (papers, etc.) in this manner. (1874)

"Next to emptying the outdoor bookdrop on cold and snowy days, weeding is the most undesirable job in the library. It is also one of the most important. Collections that go unweeded tend to be cluttered, unattractive, and unreliable informational resources."

Will Manley, The Manley Arts, Booklist, March 1, 1996, p. 1108.

"For the librarian, weeding has ... advantages. It finds the gaps in your collection so that you can make new purchases with confidence and creates space for those materials. Paradoxically, weeding is a good way to increase circulation by drawing attention to materials that had previously been overlooked."

From the Arizona State Library Collection Development Training website.

• "It takes too much time."
• "I can't bear to throw away books."
• "I'm worried someone will get upset if I get rid of anything."
• "I don't feel comfortable getting rid of public property."
• "If I toss it today, I'll need it tomorrow."
• "If I weed, I won't have enough books."
• "I'm afraid I'll throw away something valuable."
• "Weeding means admitting to mistakes."

Assembled by the Arizona State Library from the 1976 CREW manual, pp. 19-20; 1995 CREW manual, pp.53-55.

All of these statements can be refuted, and countered with the question "Can you afford not to weed?"

• Space Are you likely to get a building addition? How much shelf space do you have left? How many linear feet of books and journals do you add in a given year? How many do you discard? When are you going to run out of space?
• Collection age How valuable are your social science books from the 30s and 40s? How valuable are your current social science books? Which would you like to give visual, searching, and browsing precedence to?
• Collection condition No one loves books in poor condition, and the student who picks up and checks out a yellowed, tattered, highlighted and annotated, spine-worn book is the exception, not the rule.
• Changing curriculum How valuable is the collection of books on urban sociology to a sociology department that hasn't focused on urban issues since 1972? What are the odds that the collection stopped being maintained in 1972? What's the value in keeping those items?
• Changing student research behavior Are monographs as uniformly valuable as they once were? Or has the availability of online information changed how students approach and complete research projects? Think about microfilm as an example of an information format whose utility has declined disproportionately to the quality of the information contained on it.
• Changing information environment The internet age has indisputably changed the way we look at information archiving by libraries. If you're a JSTOR subscriber, do you need those back runs of journals anymore? Can you (and do you) trust that they are being maintained for access by others? If so, clear those shelves!

How to begin

1. Plan: Goals, stakeholders, criteria
2. Develop processes: who, what, how, when
3. Assess and modify: What worked? What's not working? What do we change?

Before you begin,

• Consult with your stakeholders Who will want to have a say in the project? Who is justified in that desire? Whose opinions on the collection really truly matter? Whose work will be affected by your actions?
• Understand your goals Project vs Ongoing, simple space goals vs long-term collection evaluation, etc.
• Have clear weeding criteria Know why you want to throw the books away, so that you know which books to throw away.

Consider who your stakeholders are, and consult as is appropriate for your library's environment

• Collection Development librarians
• Reference staff
• Technical Services department
• The library administration
• The College/University administration
• The departmental faculty
• The users

Why are you weeding?

Think about your collections policy.
Think about your philosophy of service.
Think about your local needs.
Think about your long-term goals.

Then weed.

At Potsdam, we have completed three small weeding projects and have two ongoing weeding assessments underway. All five had different criteria.

• Curriculum Weeding: A collection overhaul, focusing on poor physical condition, and items more than ten years old. The Collection Development Committee felt that textbooks more than ten years old were a disservice, not a service, to our teacher education students, and were discarded.
• Reference weeding: A targeted space-gaining weed, focused on long runs of outdated sets and selected items. Back runs of indexes and abstracts now online, superseded statistical sets, and single items which no longer fit the collection policy for Reference -- ie, bibliographies, handbooks, etc. Some materials were moved to stacks in lieu of discard.
• Periodicals weeding (ongoing): JSTOR runs We believe that, for SUNY Potsdam's needs, JSTOR is a sufficient archive and access mechanism. Titles are being discarded as space is required in the stacks.
• Microfilm weeding: Duplicated in print or in reliable online access, short runs, obscure titles. We collected much more broadly in microfilm than we now do; we now see the collection as a preservation archive and/or sole access source for unique materials.
• Stacks weeding (ongoing): Condition of item, Age of item, Inclusion of item in relevant core lists, Circulation history of item, Other holdings on the subject, including more recent editions and other titles of equal or higher relevance, Relevance to college curriculum and support of unique SUNY Potsdam programs

Be sure you have agreement about your goals

Be sure you have agreement about your criteria

Be prepared to be flexible on both

Lack of clarity on what you hope to accomplish with your project will lead the staff who are involved to act out of concert with each other. If you need to clear 100 shelves in your reference area to make room for a building project, make sure everyone understands that, and they will behave in certain ways. If you want to do an ongoing, continuous assessment of your reference collection, people will behave and react differently. Similarly, lack of agreement on your criteria for weeding will lead to inconsistent decisions on what to keep and what to discard -- be sure that "it's old" means the same thing to every participant in the project. That said, every individual will interpret the clearest criteria in different ways, so accept that the process will not and cannot be perfect. "Professional Judgement" is key, and must be acknowledged -- within reason!

Once you have goals, criteria, and stakeholder buy in, you have to figure out how to actually do it.

Consider WHO:

• Who will do the evaluation at the shelf?
• Who will do the catalog and OCLC discarding? Who will do the physical processing?
• Who needs to know regular reporting details about the work?
• Who will be responsible for coordinating and communicating between library units as necessary?

Consider HOW:

• How will books be identified -- Will the weeders pull books from the shelf, or provide lists of titles to Technical Services?
• How much time will weeders spend evaluating books?
• How many shelves, books, or hours are weeders expected to do?
• How will the books be disposed of?
• How will statistics be recorded and compiled?
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Consider WHEN and WHAT

• When will the project start? When will it end?
• When will books move from the weeders, to being discarded, to being thrown away?
• When will statistics be gathered?
• What statistics will be gathered?
• What procedures will need to be consulted, updated, or invented?
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Always stop to look at your work, and consider what's working and not working.

• Watch for burnout Are our librarians burning out on assessing? Are our tech services staff crying because there are just too many musty books in their offices?
• Watch for overload Is tech services drowning in discards? Are our storage shelves overflowing? Are the dumpsters spilling over?
• Watch for outcry, internally and externally Are stakeholders freaking out? Is this too dramatic for your users? Did you underestimate the effect on your staff and community?
  and
• Watch for under-performance of pieces of the plan Were we too cautious? Can we expand, refocus, or re-market the project to increase enthusiasm, effectiveness, and output?

Fact: Librarians hate throwing away books.

Fiction: Weeding means throwing away books.

You have options for discard

According to Joanne Fazioli, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Business Services, State University of New York,

"Chapter 122 of the Laws of 1992 (new subsection six of Section 178 of State Finance Law) allows campuses to dispose of library books or journals after the department head certifies they are no longer needed. While technically a record of each transfer or disposal, along with certification, is to be filed with OGS, I know of no campus filing with OGS nor do I think OGS is looking for such paperwork. My advice is that the campus maintain any disposal records for an audit trail -- that books/journals may be used as trade-in, donated to another entity (school district), dumped/recycled or sold for such nominal income as may be generated. The campus must collect sales tax and deposit revenue to appropriate account or transmit to General Fund based on source of funds of the original purchase (ie., State approp. - General Fund; IFR - IFR account)."

[Text of email dated November 5, 2003, forwarded to the SUNY Librarians Association email listserv on November 2, 2005 by Carey Hatch, Assistant Provost for Library and Information Services, State University of New York]

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