Never been so excited to weed before

I can't believe I haven't blogged yet this week. It was a rather exciting couple of days Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, of course, we had our class with our two guest speakers. I was very much looking forward to the class but I would be missing my son's Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet--a once a year thing. My husband was going to be going and taking all 5 kids and navigating a potluck dinner with them. I felt sorry that he wasn't going to have my help with that because taking 4 small kids through a potluck line is no small feat and having a 9 month old in tow adds to the complexity of such a task. Nevertheless, I did what I could, sent some deviled eggs and chips and wished him well.

So, now on to class. I very much enjoyed hearing and meeting Karen Lowe. She is down to earth and very frank about her methods. She basically presented the content of her book and walked us through the process of weeding. I hadn't fully appreciated the CD she gave us until she explained that the forms were there for us to adapt and fill in as needed according to our own library's situation. I just love getting practical and usable tips--especially usable right out of the box. My experiences getting started with weeding last week helped me to understand her book as well as her presentation a little better. A little experience can make a big difference in making new knowledge relevant. She made the comment that when she developed Resource Alignment, she couldn't believe it hadn't been done before and it was just "common sense." I had the same reaction as I was initially reading her text. Her approach just makes sense; it is practical, easy to understand and implement, and it seems like every librarian should already be doing this. If they aren't, they need to read Karen Lowe's book! I couldn't wait to get started with her methods when I went to my school on Friday.

So this is how I left things last Friday. The librarian (Lydia) had shown me the area she wanted me to weed out the old material--the 796's. She has two areas of 796's: one is regular non-fiction, and the other is Accelerated Reader (A.R.) non-fiction. I was working in the non-AR area, an area that she says hardly even gets a glance by students because they are so focused on getting AR points with every read. So she grabs a couple of the books and tells whether or not she'll keep the book and why. Then she walks me through the process of pulling off the barcode and old check out card in the back of the book, marking it for discard, and deleting the record from the circulation program. Then, I was on my own to look through the section for myself. I proceeded with caution because this is not MY library and I wasn't really using any specific objective criteria by which to judge these books. Most of the books were pretty old, mostly from the 70s, 80s and 90s but in decent condition. I pulled the ones I would definitely discard and I left some on the shelves that I would discard if it were only me. I am afraid if I discarded everything I wanted to, there would be only a fraction left. This was where I left off last week--I had put all the pulled books on my special shelf in the librarian's office so I could pick up where I left off.

Friday, I arrived ready to get down to business with the weeding. I asked Lydia to print a shelf list of that section and I began to work with the highlighters, marking books up for consideration. It was alarming to me how much yellow highlighting I was doing. I don't know how much Lydia will be willing to discard but we'll give it a shot. I marked the whole list then pulled the books I had gathered last week and processed them for discarding, including deleting them from the circulation software. There are lots more that should be considered for discarding, so next Friday, I intend to go back to the shelf with my highlighted list and pull some more books. I also want to look at the AR section, although Lydia assures me that those books are circulated. When I asked her if she could print a report of the circulation statistics of the 796 section, she wasn't sure how to do it. We'll have to do a little more figuring out before I can get the circulation information on this section, but I definitely want to find a way to get that information. I think Lydia will be surprised by the circulation data if we could only get our hands on it.