The Delicious Burden

Why librarians won't weed

Weeding is on my mind a lot lately.  Considering we have two huge weeding projects going on at my library, this isn't an unusual situation.  Today there was a listserv email from a community college library director asking for advice about weeding and weeding projects.  Some people replied with the standard responses of using selective criteria, subject and core title lists and usage statistics, but my question is:  if everyone else in your consortia or regional network owns a copy and it hasn't circulated in 20 years, why are you holding onto it when shelf space is at a premium, students are requesting more group study areas, you need more new books and Google Books and other full-text repositories have copies online?  Why don't librarians like to weed?

Because we are human and thus, pack rats.  We hold onto what we just might need, someday, just-in-case.  Just-in-case what, I'd like to ask?   Just-in-case that one bright-eyed student walks into your library, comes up to the reference desk and asks for that core title, written by a philosophy scholar sixty years ago and sitting on the shelf, never been used, just collecting dust.  Frankly, we can do better.  What use is that title sitting on your shelf for 20 years, when we should get rid of it, purchase materials users really want (maybe let them make the purchase requests?) and keep a constantly evolving and changing collection; as the needs of the community dictates.  A "balanced" collection is really a fantasy; does anyone really have a balanced collection?  I think its a philosophy that every library school student is taught and is supposed to emulate once they get a bibliographer gig, but it isn't practical and it isn't, well, to be honest, it isn't useful if the books are never being used.  Why are we so afraid to weed and to order relevant, useful materials that students and faculty want?  A lot of it has to do with our identities as librarians and territoriality.  I'm the only one who knows what the user needs and I alone know what is best or relevant for the collection.  We were the experts and our expertise was counted upon to find and acquire resources.  This may have been accurate back in the day when materials were scarce, ILL was slow and your local collection had to be comprehensive, balanced and "just-in-case".  In the age of Amazon, ILL turnaround of 3 days for books and 24 hours for journal articles, multitudes of electronic resources and databases, this isn't true anymore.  So, why are librarians still afraid to weed?

Some of it has to do with faculty and the perception that what we are weeding is unique and invaluable and thus, shouldn't be discarded; in fact, much of it isn't unique or valuable, but commonly held and if published before copyright protection sets in, may be in the public domain and available in full-text online from one of several digital repositories.  And yet, we still hang on to the books, not able to weed them from our collections, even though they aren't being used, most of them are irrelevant to the curriculum, research and scholarship occurring on our campuses, and duplicated in libraries all over the country.  Our main weeding project this summer is the removal of 31,000 titles from book storage off-site, which is being re-purposed by our campus in the fall.  Five years ago, these books were transferred from our main library to the storage facility, with the following criteria in mind; books published prior to 1959 (1979 for science titles) and had not circulated in the 18 years since our circulation system first went online.  These titles would remain accessible through our OPAC, and users could request them through IDS.  If an item was requested, it was brought back to the main library and the location was changed back to the main library in the catalog.  

For this project, thanks to a great tool designed by our systems administrator (called the GIST De-Selection Manager) I'm able to run a de-selection report on the 31,000 titles in our off-site storage.  The report, obtained by running OCLC numbers against a WorldCat API and several other APIs, returns holdings information for IDS Project libraries, NYS libraries which do OCLC ILL, full-text availability in Hathi Trust and Google Books, as well as Amazon prices (if available) and a recommendation to weed or keep based on a pre-determined conspectus ranking.  What it does is make the weeding decision much easier for librarians; for a major weeding project, it streamlines a majority of the labor-intensive work in checking our holdings against WorldCat, title by title.  Because the GDM also uses conspectus data, I can tailor our preferred conspectus holdings and the GDM will include this information in its final recommendation to keep or weed dependent on whether or not it is a subject area we want to grow or to shrink.  While GDM is still buggy (since a lot of the items are pre-1959 and have no ISBNs, some of the APIs have trouble returning results since they are searched using ISBNs, etc.) it has enormous potential for freeing up the decision-making of librarians when it comes time to weed.  With data in hand, I can easily make weeding decisions and feel confident to remove materials from the collection.

Its time to take the data and make evidence-based decisions; not subjective ones based on just-in-case.  Having the data will go a long way towards feeling confident enough to make the decision to weed. 

Comments on Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody"

Spending today reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations. Reading Chapters 1 and 2 has given me a couple points to ponder:

1. Professionals are fast becoming a thing of the past. With the power of new communications tools and media, information is no longer a scarce resource and librarians need to get used to the fact that our users don't need us to be gatekeepers of the written word any longer. This is becoming truly apparent in the newspaper publishing industry, but Shirky also mentions librarians and television programmers as two other examples of professionals who once were gatekeepers of scarcity.

2. Second point: broadcast and communications media are two different mediums for communicating, but they are blurring in the age of rapid social media technologies. Messages posted on MySpace are really not intended to be broadcast to the world, but shared between friends. Just because they are posted to the MySpace account just means that the user is comfortable and familiar using that technology to communicate with friends. Shirky uses the analogy of a group of teens sitting at a table in the mall's food court. You see lots of these groups every day at the mall, but you don't go and sit at the next table and overtly eavesdrop on their conversation -- this would be considered weird. This is just like the conversation on the web -- the conversation in the food court is in a public space, anyone can listen in, but most don't because it would be socially awkward and rude. The web is just a reflection of society.

Banning books is bad business

Right-on-the-money editorial from a newspaper in Northern California regarding the recent (incorrect) controversy surrounding Republican V.P. candidate Sarah Palin and charges that she tried to ban books from the local library during her tenure as small-town Wasilla, AK mayor.  Although it later turned out that Palin did not actually have a list of books she wanted banned, the editorial pointed out that:

As recounted by Anne Kilkenny, a frequent city council attendee, "Sarah said to Mary Ellen, 'What would your response be if I asked you to remove some books from the collection?' Mary Ellen sat up straight and said something along the lines of 'The books in the Wasilla Library collection were selected on the basis of national selection criteria for libraries of this size, and I would absolutely resist all efforts to ban books.

Banning books doesn't usually work; people don't like the idea and they usually react viscerally to someone attempting to ban material.  However, I thought the editorial writer made an interesting point.  That as an executive branch official, she might have the authority in place to ...

... wield considerable influence upon federal funding for libraries. In the same way that the Clinton Administration made federal funding contingent upon libraries installing filters on the Internet, Palin could advocate legislation that placed restrictions upon the selection of books.

As scary as this sounds, I find it much more likely than an outright ban on certain titles, and more cost effective.  Just pull the funding if you find something objectionable.  It is a scenario that might be all too real...

Meme: Passion Quilt

caption:  Let kids discover reading...

There is a neat meme ("...an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture") floating around the blogosphere recently: the Passion Quilt Meme, which I've read in a couple of different places, most recently Sarah Cohen's blog, and then today, on Free Range Librarian.  At first, I thought it was some "in-crowd" sort of viral blogging, where they all get it, but you don't...

Its kind of neat.  I backtracked from their blogs and was able to see a whole host of people involved with the meme, lots of edublogging, librarians, and Web 2.0 folk. 

The idea is viral...and as KGS calls them, these "...Hallmarkian abstractions" are probably a dime a dozen, but the sentiment is valid.  I posted the above picture of Griffin to illustrate what I'm passionate about, reading, but its also about discovery.  I don't want to just force books on him or pick titles for Griffin, but I want him to learn the joy of reading through discovery, make his own choices, discover his own passions, whether its books about snakes or robots or Pippi Longstocking or the X-Men comics. 
I think its also about discovery at the undergraduate level.  Lets create accessible collections, navigable websites, clear instructions -- make discovery easy and possible in our libraries.

Here's the original meme, from a blog called Around the Corner:

• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about...and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt" and link back to this blog entry. (It will be really interesting to see how many trackbacks he gets)   
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce:

My 5 folks/blogs:
Attempting Elegance
Collections 2.0
Free Range Librarian
Information Wants to be Free
Librarians Matter