Weeding (also known as deselection) is a necessary part of collection development and ensures that the library’s collections are useful and accessible.
Why Weed?
• Many books and journals are now available electronically.
• It is a disservice to customers to keep items that contain inaccurate or dated information.
• No library is large enough to keep everything. Bunch Library is facing space constraints, for our physical collection and for our students who need more study space.
• It makes it easier for people to find what they want.
• It makes our collection look more attractive, reliable, and up-to-date. Our last library survey indicated that students and faculty want a more updated collection.
We consulted several sources, especially a 2008 article from Reference & Users Services Quarterly.
We analyzed titles based on the following criteria:
Based on these criteria, we recommended to:
and for some titles we recommended one of the following actions:
We consulted the resource Management of Serials in Libraries to help determine an appropriate list of critera for analyzing the current bound periodical titles. We analyzed the titles based on the following criteria:
(Definitions of these criteria can be found under Resources Consulted below.)
For specific information on how these criteria were applied, please see the Bound Periodicals Removal Lists.