Throw-it Thursday: Creating New Collections (Yes, That Means It’s Time to Weed!)

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.

What do you do when you want to start a new collection but lack a defined space to do it in? Weed! Of course. What did you think I was going to say? This is Throw-It Thursday, after all! This type of weeding can get a little tricky because you are trying to condense a collection into a smaller space to make room for something new and different, while trying to maintain the quality of the collection/s you already have. There is no wrong way to do this-it is all subjective and each library is different, so don’t feel guilty about paring down a popular collection to make room for another popular collection.

Our children’s audio collection is one area we ran into this problem with last year. We started ordering some new items from Playaway-Launchpads and Wonderbooks. If you haven’t seen or heard of these yet, they are great products that have been really popular at my library. Launchpads are tablets that come pre-loaded with educational games/stories. Wonderbooks are physical copies of books that have the audio built in to an attached device so your kids can read along with the audio. These are great because they are one physical item (no worrying about misplacing one piece or the other, and they run on a rechargeable battery) and they have an additional learning mode that teaches them literacy skills.

Our children's audio collection after weeding and making room for our new collections.

But! We only have so much shelf space in our children’s audio area, so we had to do some re-arranging and condensing to make a shelf for them. Our children’s kits (read-a-longs with a CD) are in the blue bags. These were originally on two rows of shelving. We condensed them into one and pushed them closer together, but they are still easily browsable. We were able to keep most of them, though we did get rid of a few based on circ’s and condition. We shifted things around and ended up with those on the bottom row of one section and were able to put a shelf above them for the Wonderbooks. Playaways and more Wonderbooks are currently displayed on the top of the shelving unit. The children’s audio CDs are in some browsing bins on the last section of the shelving unit (not pictured because we talked about those in the recent past).

The audiobooks were heavily weeded based on circ’s because the shelves were packed full. Now we have them on two sections of shelving that have some breathing room to add fresh new titles to the collection again! To do this and make a little room, we had to be vigorous in our weeding. Our children’s librarian used a list of titles that hadn’t circ’ed in three years or longer (we used to do five years in this collection) as her starting point. There were a few items we kept because teachers tend to need them on a rotating basis, but for the most part, we threw a lot of items in the discard pile. Don’t be afraid to make big changes in your collections. After all, we have to keep up with changing technology and ideas, so that our patrons can continue to enjoy our services for years to come!