a bit premature March 3, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Weeding, work life.add a comment
There are mountains of snow on the corner of every parking lot, and my front lawn is a sea of icy slush, but I’m feeling like maybe it’s spring. Probably premature, I know. But the semester is in full swing, the air temperature is above freezing today, our students are chipper and cheerful right now, and daylight savings is about to ensure I actually see some sunlight every day.
So I’m feeling like doing a bit of spring cleaning. The question is: Do I clean off my desk (small task), clean out my filing cabinets and bookcase (big task), or do some weeding (neverending task)?
Toil and Trouble February 6, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Collection Management, Libraries, Users, Weeding.add a comment
I just made a passing comment to a colleague about how many copy 2s I’m pulling from the literature stacks, and she grinned at me. “Wanna know why?”
The long and the short of it is that 20 years ago someone disagreed with the decision to do a copy weed of the library in order to regain shelf space, and didn’t do the section assigned to them. That section? Literature. I’m certain that the unnamed librarian of yore had very sound reasons to objecting to the weeding project. I’m certain that those opinions were voiced and argued and in the end, denied by the leadership of the library. I’m certain that the librarian felt rebellious and stalwart and justified. But… the end result is that there are four copies of Billy Budd on the shelf, and two are so clearly in need of discarding that it makes my brain hurt. They were very likely just as clearly in need of tossing 20 years ago, but a librarian stood on a line drawn in the sand with arms folded, and refused.
I guess I could say I’m paying the price now, in that weeding is slow going in this section because there are so many extraneous items on the shelf, and it’s disheartening work.
But what I’d rather say say is that our users have been paying the price for years, because the shelves in literature look like the worst kind of library — crowded full of unappealing books, some nearly a hundred years old and not in the good historically-useful way, multiple duplicative and confusing “authoritative” editions, musty, dusty, dogeared, scribbled in, and covered in booktape over unreadable labels, and rife with spine repairs.
Our users deserve better. And they’re finally getting it, 20 years late.
I have to go wash the yuck off my hands, now.
pulling weeds February 4, 2008
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Books, Collection Management, Libraries, Weeding.7 comments
I just spent forty five minutes weeding in the PS3505 section. Willa Cather and e e cummings, and their contemporaries who’re quickly drifting off into the mists of literary awareness.
Weeding is cathartic in its own way; some of my colleagues struggle to throw away books, but I think there’s something extremely apt about using the word ‘weeding’ to describe this kind of collection maintenance. Weeding. Pruning. Tending. Collections need all of that to thrive and grow productively.
We actively collected the majority of our material on Cather and cummings in the era in which they were most talked about in academia. The collecting patterns of those days were very different than the ones we’re building now, and the materials on the shelves from that era are distinctive. What we now no longer have on the shelves are: copy 2s of their major works, print bibliographies, single pam-bound critical essays, and seriously wounded books. What’s left is a much leaner and much more fit collection — the best copies of their works, volumes of thematic criticism, and biographical material, reduced by about 25%. It’s easier to visually sort through, it’s more appropriate to research in a modern information environment, and it’s closer to being the right collection for this undergraduate institution’s curriculum.
None of which is to say that having four copies of My Antonia was wrong, when the extra three were purchased. Or that those bibliographies weren’t extremely useful at the time. Or that those single critical essays weren’t gorgeously and valuably cataloged on the day they were pam-bound. It’s just to say that this collection, today, needed to be pruned and tended to best serve today’s users.
That 25% isn’t hard for me to do, when it’s appropriate. It’s hard for some librarians, appropriate, needed, or not. The 32-year-old part of me wonders if that’s because I didn’t work in this gorram library on the day the books were bought, so I have less personal attachment to them. The analytical part of me wonders if it’s because some librarians wish that they worked in research institutions with preservation and collection mission very different from their own. The skeptical part of me wonders if it’s just that, culturally, librarians believe that all books are good books and good books should be in libraries.
Whatever the case, I’m not suffering for weeding. My hands are a bit dirty, my knees are sore from kneeling, and my cart is full of weeds. And the garden’s a lot nicer.
I can live with that.
all for the lack of a camera November 9, 2007
Posted by Jenica Rogers in I amuse myself, Libraries, Weeding.1 comment so far
I was going to do a very FRIDAY kind of post about how “Professional is: doodlybopper hair, jelly beans, and a big truck of books to throw away”, mainly because my hair’s totally wonky today so I spun it up into two little buns that look like ears or horns or alien antennae or something, and also because it took me all of seven minutes to weed four linear feet of books off of our PR 83-85 shelves because they were in such need of weeding that it was a total no brainer, and also because it’s Friday and my pretty cashmere sweater is totally color-coordinated with my weeding truck.
But my camera is at home, and so you’ll just have to envision that I am the future of our profession, sitting here with amusing hair, eating Jelly Bellys from Monterey, and throwing away outdated materials while being stunningly color coordinated.
Have a lovely weekend!
on weeding September 24, 2007
Posted by Jenica Rogers in Collection Management, Libraries, The Profession, Weeding.5 comments
Library Packrats: Come on, folks. It’s time to let go. I know you spent a lot of money on some of those books. I know you may not be able to afford to replace everything. I know you are busy. I know that you can’t keep up with everything. But I don’t want to hear you complaining about “no shelf space” if you have a collection full of old junk. Throw it out.
Then there are those of us who want to react in the opposite way. I’d just as soon throw out almost everything that’s even the least bit outdated. And maybe that’s not the solution, either. But there must be a balance between keeping it all and pitching it all. In theory, that’s what we are trained to do – make intelligent decisions about the collections we cultivate and the information we make available.
Hurrah to that, from Emily Clasper at Library Revolution. Today my library hosted its semi-regular luncheon for emeriti librarians and retired staff, and I was asked to speak briefly about our new initiative to weed. (See Throw It All Out for my most recent presentation on the subject.) One of my colleagues said in a tongue-in-cheek way before I joined the luncheon that I shouldn’t talk about weeding, I should talk about anything else instead, because did I really want to tell a group of dedicated retired professionals that I was throwing out everything they ever bought?
*gulp*
Well, no. But… what we’re doing is important. So I stood up and smiled and equivocated a little bit, but really did get down to it eventually: We’re in a zero-growth library — 40 years, and we’re full, and still buying books. We have to make room for new materials, and no one envisions a future in which a library renovation or expansion will create more space for stacks. (We can envision a future which has a renovation or expansion, but it’s much more likely to be for multi-functional collaborative study spaces, offices to bring together a more integrated learning commons, and other modern administrative and organizational concepts for teaching, learning, and research. Not for books, and double-not for remote storage facilities, which do nothing but hold books. I got a few blinking, confused looks when I made that statement. Talk about rate of change — that’s NOT the vision of libraries that our emeriti have.)
So. We have to have room for new books. We’ve reached zero growth. There’s no movement for storage. That means weeding. I emphasized that it also doesn’t mean dumpstering books; there are options. (See presentation, above.) I also emphasized that it’s an imperfect science, and we’ve had to come to terms with that. Emily points out a truth above: We’re going to make intelligent decisions about our collections, because that’s what we’re trained to do, it’s what we believe in, and it’s what we can do better than anyone else at our institution can. What’s harder to say to yourself, your colleagues, and your users is that we might be wrong.
And I think that’s what stops a lot of librarians dead in their tracks about weeding — they might make the wrong decision, and throw out the best book ever. And, as Emily points out, they (and their predecessors) put a lot of time and energy and money into building the collection that they’re now taking apart. So it’s a big emotional and financial investment, and there are no hard and fast rules to follow, so what’s right and what’s wrong? No one can say. Instead, we each have to rely on our understanding of our institution, our policies, our users, our curriculum and programs, our history, our long-term plans and needs, and our context in the community, region, consortium, and state. That’s a lot to hold in your head when what you’re doing is looking at a dusty 80 year old book on analyzing race and class in America. Is it relevant to the curriculum? Should it be kept for historical reasons? Is it the last copy in the system? Is it a classic in the field? Does it meet our collections policy? Is it circulating? Does it need updated cataloging in order to be truly useful? Are there 40 other questions I should be considering, as well?
That’s a lot to think about, and to track through when what you need is a Yes Or No Answer about the fate of a book.
But here’s the thing I come back to: This is our job, and we have to trust our instincts. Those questions are questions that we have to ask, and we know how to ask, and we know we should ask. Most people wouldn’t even know to ask them, let alone how to find answers or trust their instincts.
Will we be wrong sometimes, even trusting our instincts and using our best professional judgement to make decisions? Of course we will. We do it when we weed, we do it when we buy books (you can’t tell me that everything a library buys turns out to be a high-circulating item of much demand), and we do it when we implement, change, or discontinue services. We’re just not always right. But we do the very best we can, and that has to be good enough, else we’ll never move forward. We have to be brave, and trust ourselves.
Which means, yes, we have to weed. C’mon, it’ll be fun. The only other option is to start building office furniture out of old journals, and that’ll be wickedly uncomfortable.
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Now playing: Rooney – Paralyzed
via FoxyTunes
Jenica Rogers
