Here is the middle of the year report for weeded vs added books! I’m happy to see that even if the year has been CRAZY, with a lot of people changing (one of my colleagues who is weeding fiction has left), I managed to continue the rhythm and weed, weed, weed! :)
And I learned a LOT! I know the library collection much better now. I know the procedures much better. And I know what circulates and what not much better. There is a loooooot of outdated books. There are some damaged books. And books that are not popular, and not important. It seems that in the past some parts of the collection was built by donations and that’s very visible.
It was so busy in the library – we got a massive donation of art books so we had to weed Art & Recreation (700) before adding some books from the donation. There is a volunteer who is specialized in art so he helped a lot in this department while I worked on the music section. Then we had some shifting of collections and I worked a lot on General Work & Information Sciences (000) section. I really cleaned it up! Then there were all those overflows in Social Sciences (300). Still working on those. We are moving forward. In the future articles I will write about separate collections.
So, here are the numbers from beginning of January to the end of June:
| Acquisition 2023 | 928 |
| Weeding 2023 | 1223 |
Fantastic results and I’m so proud! I hope we will continue in this direction. There will be more books entering, as the situation with staffing calms down, but I’m hoping we will end the year at 50-50.
Top three weeded collections are:
- Arts & Recreation (472 books) - 38.59% of all weeded books
- Audiobooks (250 items) - 20.44% of all weeded items (Note: Audiobooks collection was dissolved since it was built completely from donations and it became extremely outdated)
- Social Sciences (154 books) – 12.59% of all weeded books
Honorable mention:
- General Work & Information Sciences (138 books) – 11.28% of all weeded books
I still have a lot of work in Social Sciences, but I will also start operating in Fiction, since nobody weeded there this year and we will probably start exploding.
To conclude, so far so good! Weeding is integral part of keeping the collection up to date, and one the most important steps that make a librarian understand the library collection. I’m bursting with other ideas, inspired by weeding. What is the circulation of each collection? And how can all this data influence the acquisition of new materials?