Alright! My first massive wedding session is over with great success! The Musique du Monde collection is done! I worked hard, and my boss approved the choices.
I started working on the wedding sometime in June. I prepared the plan, which I published here on the blog in July. Here’s a quick recap:
• Musique du monde collection had 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
Working Hard
Following the wedding criteria, I started working in June and slowly and carefully went through each and every CD in the Musique du Monde collection. It was a long process, but I took my time and worked methodically. The work consisted of two stages:
• Pulling out CDs from the shelves based on the criteria
• Researching the artist and album for background information and significance
There were a lot of CDs that hadn't been used in many years. I tried to be generous — for the CDs on the open shelves, I considered them "to keep" if the last circulation was until 2020. For the CDs in the reserve, I considered them "to keep" if the last circulation was until 2017-2018. But even with these generous time frames, there was a lot of unused music. I had to remove it. Some I kept because they were valuable or culturally important, but there was a lot of music that could go.
The album that was unused the longest was Twenty Greatest Hits by Guy Mitchell. The last time it circulated was in 2006 — almost 20 years ago. :(
In any case, I worked hard until the end of July, pulled out the CDs, and then went on summer vacation. When I came back, I asked my boss for approval, and it was approved. In total, 306 CDs were weeded.
Statistics
| # of CDs BEFORE | # of CDs AFTER | % of total collection BEFORE | % of total collection AFTER |
| 1168 | 862 | 10,06% | 7,43% |
I'm glad to see that I hit the target objective — to weed 20-30% of the Musique du Monde collection. Weeding 306 CDs corresponds to 26.16% of the collection. Of the 306 CDs, 218 (71.24%) came from the reserve, and 88 (28.76%) came from the open shelves. This means the reserve is noticeably smaller, and there is a lot of space to move other collections. However, the open shelves are not as airy as I had hoped. Obviously, the CDs visible to our members circulate more than those hidden in the reserve.
Final Thoughts
I learned a lot! First, weeding music is a long process. It almost feels longer than weeding books. Maybe because I didn’t know much about Musique du Monde, and it took me a lot of time to research each candidate for weeding. But the long-term weeding tactic worked — every day I did a little, and I managed to finish the project. I'm happy with the result and stand behind my decisions. They were based on usage statistics, physical condition, and cultural importance.
While weeding, I realized that we cannot keep everything because we are here to serve our public, not to archive. That’s not our mission. So, I feel that the collection is now more representative of our users' tastes. Still, it was hard to remove such a large number of CDs. But my boss told me that weeding hadn’t been done for a long time and that the previous music librarian didn’t like to weed, so everything was kept. That’s not good either.
In the end, the shelves look much better, though I would have liked to weed more from the open shelves. We’ll need to create more space by weeding the other collections — that means classical music, which is my next objective. It’s time to keep on keeping on...