Weeding* (or deselection) is a really important part of collection management in libraries and we spent a chunk of yesterday's class talking about it. Weeding makes it easier for people to find what they want in the library's collection and unweeded collections often include outdated stereotypes and inaccurate information.
My prof told us about this great weeding site yesterday in class, and since I was helping to weed today at work I got into a discussion with the other librarian who hadn't seen the site. Its the Weed of the Month by Sunlink, sponsored by the Florida Department of Education.
The SUNLINK Weed of the Month program is an effort to help provide Florida’s K-12 School Library Media specialists with guidelines and suggestions for weeding their collections "a little at a time" as well as for adding quality materials. The program idea and specific suggestions came from other media specialists via LM_NET, a listserv for library media specialists, and SUNLINK’s Weed of the Month is now used throughout the country. A subject section of school library media collections will be identified each month as a weeding target.
The best part is the section with the "things we've dug up while weeding" -- where librarians write in about the funny and scary titles discovered by media specialists around the world.
* not to be confused with the type of weed research Shachar does
Posted by Emily at November 21, 2004 08:27 PM