Thursday, May 19, 2022

Throw-it Thursday - Mental Health Books

Ashley Borman, Technical Services Librarian at the Clintonville (WI) Public Library and YSS board member, is back with her monthly column and is taking a look at books on mental health in our collection.

May is National Mental Health Awareness Month

Contributed image

I know we’ve talked about the medical section before, but this is a very important section to monitor regularly. As fast as technology and medical information (diagnosis, treatments, etc.) changes, you have got to keep up with it! According to the CREW method (there is a great CREW manual available here), any drug reference books should be removed if they are more than three years old. Medications change so frequently, and the warnings are always being updated, so anything older than three years is not giving accurate information. 

In general, books in the medical books on mental health are out of date within a few years. Anything over 5 years old should be removed. If you are in the stacks, and see titles that are old/outdated, but not within your purview to remove, don’t be afraid to take them to the correct department and say, “These are old and outdated and could cause harm to our patrons.” Do what you can to get them out of the library!

On the other hand, self-help books or books on the psychology of the mind can be held onto a bit longer. These tend to be weeded more on usage statistics and how popular they are with your patrons. The more clinical titles in this area should be replaced after 5-8 years, according to the CREW method. But the self-help books can be done in a variety of ways. Keep track of popular trends and remove those titles when they are no longer popular.

There are fewer children’s titles in this area, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be checking regularly to see what you have and what is outdated! In this section, when you are in doubt, it is better to Throw-It in the discard pile!

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