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At the beginning of the year I ran reports to see the size of each music collection and circulation data. I did some data processing and shared it with my boss and colleagues. I will write a separate post about it. What we identified was that our music collection is way to big compared to circulation stats. Our stacks are full, crowded, and we need to liberate some space so we can rearange the collections and rethink how everything is organized. We identified three collections that needs to be weeded - jazz, musique du monde and classical music. My boss, who is a big jazzman, decided he will weed jazz, and I will do musique de monde and classical. Allright, my first weeding campaign as a music librarian can start!

I decided to start with Musique du monde, because I have a little bit more experience with it. I don't have any historical data about when it was weeded last time, but seeing the size, it seems a long time.

Data Insights

• Musique du monde collection has 1168 CDs (~10% of total CDs)

• In 2024, there was 198 checkouts (~3.63% of total CD circulation)

• This shows a massive mismatch between collection size and actual use

Objective

I calculated that strictly aligning collection size to usage would mean weeding ~64% (about 747 CDs) of musique du monde - but that felt too aggressive. I decided on a 20–30% reduction target, meaning weeding roughly 234 to 350 CDs from to balance space and usage realistically.

Weeding Criteria

1. Circulation: Weed CDs with zero or minimal checkouts in the last 5-6 years

2. Content/Relevance: Weed duplicates, obsolete or mislabelled genres, and low-demand compilations

3. Physical Condition: Weed damaged, incomplete, or poor-quality items

4. Cultural Value: Retain rare, local, or culturally significant items, even if usage is low

Final thoughts

Musique du monde collection is shelved in two locations - open shelves in Espace Musique et Cinéma & reserve, which is closed to public. In general, I'm not really a fan of reserve - materials are invisible and rarely circulate. Our users like to browse. So I decided that I will try and rarely move the CDs from open shelves to reserve. Somehow in my head, I picture a future without reserve, everything open to users. But that means less materials. I'm looking forward to see how much will I learn from this process - learning about musicians, music and our users habits. Also, I'm excited to see how will weeding influence circulation of materials, our politique documentaire and how will the shelves look like :)