Throw-It Thursday: Book by Book

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.

    Do you ever take the time to go through your collections book by book to look for problem items? If you can make the time to do a shelf at a time, I highly encourage going through book by book and doing a visual assessment and weed what is necessary. I cannot tell you how many times this has helped me find books with issues that were missed at check in. I’m talking torn pages, spine damage, gross stains, MOLD! I try to periodically go through our collections shelf by shelf (I do my whole library, but you could split it up by departments or enlist the help of other staff members if that is too overwhelming for you), on the hunt for items that need to go. 

    I pull each book off the shelf, flip through the pages to look for tears and stains. Then I flip the book and check for spine issues. If I find damage that is repairable, I bring it back to the workroom and repair it. If it is beyond repair, I throw them in the discard pile. If it has some kind of damage that is minimal and non-repairable, but the item can still circulate, I put a damaged sticker in it to tell what kind of damage staff have noted and when. This is helpful, especially when we send items to other libraries, so they know the damage was already there and their patrons won’t be charged for it.

    There are so many ways to weed. Many people stick to the basics, but I find that going through the entire once in a while and doing an in depth look at items is a great way to find those items that are past their prime that may get overlooked. It is also a great way to learn your collection and find gaps that you may want to fill.

CCBC Choices Now Available!

CCBC Choices 2023, the annual best-of-the-year list created by professional staff of the Cooperative Children’s Book Center of the School of Education at UW-Madison, is now available!

CCBC Choices 2023 recommends 212 books published in 2022 for children and teens from birth through high school age.

CCBC Choices 2023 is a digital publication. Entries for each book includes full bibliographic citation, annotation, age recommendation and cover image, and a link to the book’s entry in the CCBC-Recommended Book Search database, where custom lists can be created. The publication also includes an introductory essay and name/title index.

For more information visit the CCBC Choices web page.

Choices Presentations Online

Want to find out about some of the books in CCBC Choices 2023?  The CCBC librarians will be doing two online Choices presentations sponsored by the South Central Library System in March:

 

·         Great New Books for Children Birth - Grade 5: Wednesday, March 15, 9-10 am

·         Great New Books for Older Children and Teens (Grades 6-12): Wednesday, March 29, 9-10 am

 

If you can’t attend the sessions live, they will be recorded and available for viewing afterward on the Online Presentations Archive page on the CCBC web site.

A Diversity Audit in Real Life

Claire Parrish, the Public Services Director at the Rice Lake (WI) Public Library reached out to us after our recent post on doing diversity audits. She offered to share their process and experience tackling their juvenile and YA collections. Here's Claire!

While COVID has thrown a wrench in a lot of our plans, one thing that has been nice is it gave us the motivation to dig into some projects that are very time/detail intensive.  One such project is a diversity audit of our Juvenile and YA fiction.  A post was shared a few weeks back giving an introduction of how to complete an audit, so I thought I’d share how we’ve made it happen here at the Rice Lake Public Library. 

 

I kicked the project off by creating the spreadsheet of categories I wanted to evaluate.  You can get as specific or as general as you want with these, so really think about what you’re hoping to learn from the audit when coming up with them.  My main goal was to look at racial diversity, which gave me a starting place with categories.  I also really liked the Any Child and Beautiful Life categories from the Diverse Children’s Book Finder tool, so I incorporated those along with gender/ sexual orientation, author information, and if the character was main or secondary as my sub categories.  Then I pulled in some categories from the wonderful Karen Jensen regarding disabilities, separating them by visible and invisible. Since we all know there are lots of books with nonhuman characters, I threw in those categories as well.  A notes section was added for needed clarification, such as noting if a character was multiple races. 

Here’s a screenshot, because that was a lot!  

Tip: use 1’s so that you can add everything up at the end.

I then ran a list of titles for each collection and was ready to start!  

 

Two of my wonderful library assistants are going through and evaluating each title for the categories listed. They're using the book description in our MORE library catalog, Kirkus Reviews, various blogs, and then grabbing the book if they need more information.  It is time consuming, but it has been a good project to work on with slower traffic due to COVID. We are picking back up with patron visits, so the progress has slowed a little, but I’m confident we’ll finish the project soon.  Another bonus is that it’s gotten my library assistants more familiar with the collection, so think about assigning it to newer staff as a way for them to learn what’s available to patrons. 

Here’s a link to the YA Diversity Audit spreadsheet, feel free to copy and use as a start for your own audit!

You can contact Claire at claireparrish@ricelakegov.org