Throw-It Thursday: Music Edition

Ashley Borman, Technical Services Librarian at the Clintonville (WI) Public Library is back with her monthly column and has some great advice on making sure your collections are updated.

Welcome to another Throw-It Thursday! Let’s talk about something besides books today. How about Music CD’s? When is the last time you went through your music collection and weeded? I won’t lie. I don’t make this area a priority, mostly because we don’t tend to get as many new music CD’s as we used to. With online streaming, they just don’t go out like they once did. But that’s no excuse! We should still be throwing these in the weeding pile if they aren’t circulating!

As always, we should consider their last circ date. If a music CD has not gone out in the last 5 years, why in the world are you hanging on to it?! Throw-It in the discard pile! Also consider the space you have for the collection. Is it overly crowded? Then you might need to be stricter in your guidelines. You could go to a smaller circulation window, say three years of no circs. Or, with discs, you could look at how many checkouts they’ve had. If it is over 100, you should definitely be checking their condition. If you find damaged discs as you are weeding, that look beyond repair, consider whether or not they are worth being replaced. If not, chuck ‘em in the discard pile! There are any number of ways to decide how to weed discs, but I find usage and condition to be my go-to options. These usually weed enough out of the collection that there is plenty of room to add new items.

The image below is a few CD’s we recently discarded. Top: a once popular item that lost popularity over time. Bottom: an old item that hasn’t circulated in over 5 years, and a newer item that had very few circs but had not gone out in some time.