Evelyn S. Field Library Blog

The Importance of "Weeding" a Library

Let's first begin with the definition of weeding.  According to Arizona State Library, "weeding (also known as deselection) is an essential element of collection development that ensures the library’s materials are useful and accessible."

Useful and accessible.  Those are the two biggies and they affect one another.  If our library is filled with non-useful items, the useful ones are no longer accessible because they're buried.  If our library is filled with useful items, they will be obviously accessible. 

When someone is faced with the "threat" of having a book removed, the reaction is often emotional.  People can have a very hard time letting go of a book.  They want to hold on to them for their beauty, sentimentality, or "just in case" someone might want it someday.

However, our collection is designed to serve our students in this specific school and community.  The collection needs to serve RVCC's curriculum, the pleasure-reading interests of our students, and the lesson plan needs of our professors.  That's it.

So what does this mean on a larger scale?  It means we do not publish and keep every fiction book.  We are looking for the ones that OUR students are interested in.  And our focus on non-fiction are those that directly support our curricula.  Any items that are redundantly available online in ebooks or databases are also considered for removal.

Now, we know that some reply to that statement with, "but what if the internet goes down?"  Yes, sometimes wifi fails us and we can't get online.  But that is not a reason to with duplicate information "just in case."  An academic library needs to be filled with relevant daily-use resources that complement and extend what students are finding online.  It is not a stop-gap measure "just in case" the internet goes down.  

Besides, contrary to popular belief, all of the world's knowledge is not available online through Google, and much of the reliable information that is online is only available through fee-based services.  If everything our students needed to prepare themselves as modern learners and successful global citizens was already online, we would take appropriate measures.  But we're not there yet.  Not even close.  Books are still vital.

The question then remains:  what are appropriate reasons to remove a book?  The CREW:  A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries has a useful acronym for just such a purpose:  M-U-S-T-I-E.  If a book is MUSTIE, it should probably go.  Weeding is ever so much more complicated than an acronym can convey, but sharing it lends transparency to our process.

In the pursuit of that useful help, one of our librarians created an infographic of CREW:  A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries's MUSTIE acronym using easel.ly.  We hope you find it informative and educational.  Please share.  You can also find it online via LibrarianDesignShare.org at librariandesignshare.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/weeding.jpg. 

easel.ly

Interested in creating your own infographic?  Here are some other great infographic creation sites that you should give a try:

venngage
piktochart
infogram