Throw-It Thursday - Weeding Policies

Ashley Borman, Technical Services Librarian at the Clintonville (WI) Public Library and YSS board member, is back with her weeding tips column. 

Image by Lubos Houska from Pixabay

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but when I started in my current position, I started a heavy weeding of the entire library. This was necessary because the previous director had a hard time letting things go. There were so many items on the shelves that they were packed full with books lying sideways on top of the upright shelved books. 

As I was making space in the collection, giving it room to breathe and add new materials, some people noticed that the shelves were not as full as they used to be. A few patrons brought it up to staff at the front desk and one even complained to the director. Luckily, we already had a weeding policy in place. Having a section in your Collection Development Policy about weeding is a great idea, if you don’t mention it already. Having a policy in place can help staff deal with answering patron questions and demands by giving them a ready-made statement that has been approved by the library board.

My library’s collection development policy on weeding is:

“An up-to-date, attractive and useful collection is maintained through a continual withdrawal and replacement process. Replacement of worn volumes is dependent on current demand, usefulness, more recent acquisitions, and availability of newer editions. This ongoing process of weeding is the responsibility of the library director, and is authorized by the Board of Trustees. Withdrawn materials will be handled in a similar manner and under the same authority as donated materials.”

This statement is vague but points out several reasons why materials might be discarded and not replaced. While it specifies that this is the responsibility of the director, the director can choose how to handle weeding - in my library, the director chooses to let the youth services and technical services librarians handle the discarding of materials. Having this statement on weeding in our collection development policy has saved us a lot of headache over the years when dealing with patrons who get upset when they see something they liked is no longer a part of the collection.