Weeding

Last school year I did not do any weeding. I inherited a bunch of discarded books that I did not know what to do with and did not want to add to my problem. Fortunately I had a chance to work on weeding at JMMS and get a more complete understanding of the process. We began by discussing the weeding criteria that he uses. To discard a book the following criteria are considered:

• Poor condition/damaged
• Outdated (old copyright or publication date)
• Outdated or biased information
• Unappealing to read
• Other copies of same book exist in collection
• Other, better books on the same topic exist in the collection

Once we had established the basis for keeping or weeding a book we began working on the nonfiction collection. I found the task difficult as although some of the books were very old there were not always newer options available. In this case we needed to determine if any of the information was inaccurate and whether or not students were checking out the book. If anything was inaccurate the book was discarded and we made a note to find another of the same focus. If students were using the book regularly it was less clear whether or not to get rid of it. A lot of the time the cover of the books was so dated as to make the book unattractive to teens. These books got weeded quickly to make room for more modern takes.