Weeding, Part I

    Weeding is the term generally used by librarians to refer to the systematic act of removing and withdrawing items from the library's collection.    It is a task that often doesn't get a whole lot of love from library staff members; weeding is a time consuming and more often than not dirty (or at least dusty) process that will ultimately involve the attention of at least three different members of the staff:  the librarian who makes the decision to pull the book from the shelf, the technical services librarian or assistant who removes the item from the library's electronic list of holdings, and the maintenance worker who must bundle and cart the books away for disposal or sale.   Because it eats up so much staff time, because it's  sometimes hard not to second guess yourself when making the decision to remove something from the collection,  and also because there seems to be an almost universal aversion to discarding books, weeding is often something that is avoided at all costs, or at least until the librarian's back is up against the proverbial wall.

     The library  I work for maxed out of shelf space in the adult department several years ago and, as a result, I have been forced to weed on a more or less regular basis ever since.  When I first started working there 14 years ago, the decision to weed wasn't  a matter of creating more shelf space, it was simply a matter of  removing no longer accurate non-fiction titles along with popular fiction by authors who had fallen out of favor (Jacqueline Suzann, anyone?).   I saw weeding these titles as an act of virtue, a way to improve the overall quality of the collection I was in charge of maintaining.  

    However, as is the case in just about every public library that sees its book budget grow and its shelf space remain unchanged, the condition I refer to as shelf stasis will  inevitably set in - for every book going into the collection, there needs to be a book being weeded out.   It is a situation that infuriates that segment of the public that neither uses the library nor wants to pay taxes to support it (why do we need to give the library more money if they already have enough books?).   Even people who love the library may have trouble understanding why we're getting rid of a book that they enjoyed when they read it twenty years ago but which no one has checked out in the last fifteen years. 

    There are   those who may come up with the argument that purchasing older books in e-book format might be a way for libraries to deal with their space limitations.   Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this particular line of reasoning.   First, with so many public library budgets in free fall, there is no way that the majority of libraries are able to find room in their ever shrinking book budgets to keep up with new purchases, let alone the retrospective purchasing of older titles. (I did do a quick search on Amazon and was pleasantly surprised to see that a large number of works by authors such as Leon Uris, Howard Fast, James Hilton, and Harrold Robbins were available for Kindle.)  However, an equally serious concern for libraries is that  in the current e-book business model, libraries  rent rather than own the titles everyone believes they are "purchasing"; the actual e-book content is hosted on a server that does not belong to the library and over which the library ultimately has no control.  Additionally, Harper Collins became the first publisher to institute  a 26 "check out" limit on the number of times that a library may loan an e-book, after which the library is required to repurchase the title.   In large and busy library systems where best selling titles can easily reach check-out figures in the three digits, this is a situation that is unsustainable for libraries in the long term.

How does all this relate to mysteries?   That will be coming in Weeding, Part II 

 

Comments

[[email protected]]

My sister works at a library....this gives me lots of questions to ask her the next time we get together....it also gives us authors one more thing to worry about - our books being weeded out.

[[email protected]]

what did I do wrong in that my email address is displayed instead of website? www.juliekramerbooks.com

[Dale Spindel]

I think it's supposed to display your email but I really don't know anything much about the mechanics of Typepad. Sorry.

[android developers]

It also gives us authors one more thing to worry about - our books being weeded out...I really don't know anything much about the mechanics of Type pad...Nice blog..