Throw-It Thursday - Computers and Technology

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.

While there is not generally a huge amount of computer/technology manuals in the children’s non-fiction, it doesn’t hurt to go over what to keep and what to throw on the discard pile. With the rapid changes in technology and the constantly updating information about applications and programs, we need to stay on top of this section and make sure our books are current. It is a good idea to go through this section and pick out any titles that seem like they might be outdated. You can take them back to your office and peruse them to see what kind of information they contain, or see what volume/version is the newest. For example, if you have a number of books on various Microsoft Excel versions, you probably don’t need them all. Keeping one or two books from the most current version and the version before the most current version is all you really need. Keeping books on old and outdated versions is unnecessary and leaves a lot for patrons to try to wade through to find what they are looking for.

These two books for old versions of Excel and iOS were still on our shelves!

While most of these items might be found in the adult collection, they do sometime show up in children’s collections. And there are always a few books that make it into this area that are not manuals. Take this Artificial Intelligence book for example. This book was added to our collection in 2010. It is over 10 years old, and while some of the information in it is still good, there have been so many advances in this area in the last 10 years that we should really have something newer with more up-to-date information in it. So get out there and find those old outdated computer/technology resources and Throw ’Em out! Get your shelves updated with some new, updated materials!