Throw-It Thursday: The Five W’s of Weeding, Part 2: Where and When

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Ashley Borman, Technical Services Librarian at the Clintonville (WI) Public Library and YSS board member, continues a five-part series on weeding. Stay tuned for the next few months as she shares insights on the Five W's of Weeding

Last time, we talked about why weeding is important. I talked about some relevant information found in some old pamphlets about weeding. Today we will talk about where and when to weed using some information from those pamphlets again. The WHERE is short and simple: you weed at your library, in whatever collections you are responsible for. It’s so obvious it almost doesn’t need to be said. But I felt bad excluding one of the five W’s so here it is. 

WHEN to weed, is a little bit more ambiguous. Ideally, the entire library should be weeded to some extent every year. But you can choose when to do larger weeds based on your schedule and what else you have going on. Weeding the Collection makes a good point that I should strive to follow more myself.  “It should be remembered that one’s judgement diminishes after several hours of weeding and therefore two to three hours per day should be the maximum period.” I sometimes find myself working on my year end weeding list for entire days at a time, and by the end of the day, my weeding has drastically changed from how I was doing it at the start. 

Another rule of thumb I like (and which we do at my library) is mentioned in Weeding the Library. Whenever books are returned, they should be checked over to assess their condition. At my library, if they are in rough shape, the get marked as damaged and given to me to assess further (for possible replacement, discarding, mending, billing, etc.). So really, the WHEN of weeding is that it is always happening, however small of a weed it might be. It’s just the larger, more time consuming weeds that need to be a bit more planned out.

Sources of interest:

“Weeding the Library: Suggestions for the Guidance of Librarians of Small Libraries.” Wisconsin Free Library Commission; Madison, 1949. 

“Weeding the Collection.” Division for Library Services, Bureau of Public and Cooperative Library Services, 1977.

Please stop here for the rest of this series (links go live as they are published monthly):

The Five W's of Weeding, Part 1 - Why

The Five W's of Weeding, Part 3 - Who

The Five W's of Weeding, Part 4 - What

The Five W's of Weeding, Part 5 - How