If you have a flower garden, you know first hand the benefits of keeping it weeded. The plants grow better, the bed looks neater, and you don’t have to push past the crab grass and bind weed to get to the flowers. Weeding is just as important for a library collection and for many of the same reasons. Removing the unread, untrue and unattractive materials leaves room for new materials and makes it that much easier for library visitors to find what they want (or didn’t know they wanted until they happened to catch a glimpse of it on that tidy shelf full of new-looking books).
Sometimes knowing what is a weed and what is a plant can be difficult. Lucky for us, there’s a manual out there to help with weeding the collection. Jeanette Larson with the the Texas State Library and Archives Commission revised and updated CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries in 2008. It’s huge, but worth a careful browse. The manual includes guidelines for videogames in the “CREWing Nonprint Media” chapter, helpful suggestions in the chapter “What to do with Weeded Books: Types of Disposal” and I especially like the section called “Epilogue–Encouraging the Hesitant Weeder.”
Don’t worry, the old stand-by information is still there, like M.U.S.T.I.E. (Misleading, Ugly, Superseded, Trivial, Irrelevant and Elsewhere, as in “The material or information may be obtained expeditiously Elsewhere through interlibrary loan, reciprocal borrowing, or in electronic format”). With the new Kansas Library Express courier, “obtained expeditiously Elsewhere” takes on new meaning!
Along with the CREW guidelines for each section of your collection, some circulation reports and your MUSTIE senses, consider using the Three Pile system. Patti Butcher and Laura DeBaun, the ‘Ninja weeders’ at NEKLS when I was a new director, shared this with me and I think it works great. You have one pile for repairs and replacements, one pile for weeds and finally, the “Second Chance” pile. This is where you put those books that were overlooked when they were first purchased or that are in such great condition that they deserve a second chance. Put them on display and if they check out, they will naturally go back into the collection and if they don’t, you weed them after six weeks. This can be hard, especially when you were the one to select and purchase the book, but it’s ok. Sometimes we buy a plant for our garden and it dies. You have to weed it and move on. Just know that time spent tending the library collection is time well spent and the huge bouquet of increased circulation statistics will prove it. So put on your garden gloves and dig in!
