Lessons learned

My group met again last night face to face, minus Lee Ann, at the Hickory building, because she had a conflict. We began with the intentions of having a "short" meeting because Amanda has comany coming in to town, but we ended up staying until they kicked us out shortly before 9. Then I went to Barnes and Noble and worked on finishing up my weeding project until they kicked me out at 11:00. If I had it to do all over again, I would do some things differently. I spent a lot of time at the school helping the librarian to weed and I gained a lot of valuable experiences, but these do not translate at all on paper. I was ultimately disappointed in what I turned in as my selection/deselection project. There were things I wanted to do but either ran out of time to do or didn't know how to put it together. I also hit some speedbumps in searching for information about the books I had chosen. I spent a great deal of time working with the librarian (Lydia), helping her to weed her own way, which was very different from Karen Lowe's way, but I imagine a lot of librarians might also weed in the same way that Lydia does. She picks a shelf section and visually scans the selections, pulling those that look like they are either worn out, or too old, checking copyrights, of course.

I have also used this method. Then I have used a shelf list and (at great effort, but that's another story) a circulation report. I very much prefer using a shelf list and circulation report. No matter how in tune the librarian is with his or her collection and patrons, I do not believe anyone can truly keep up with which books are being checked out and which are not in the non-fiction section. Hence the circulation report. The librarian has been hesitant to allow me to weed the AR section of non-fiction because she insists that kids check these out. OK, how does she KNOW? She did not know how to print a circulation report, neither did the county media coordinator. Eventually, I figured it out with the software manual and access to the circulation report application. Even with the best of intentions, a librarian can't know everything about the collection, and a librarian can have too much attachment to the books that move in and out of the library on a day to day basis. I found that my visual evaluation of the shelved books yielded a much smaller pool of books to discard than my less personal evaluation using the shelf list. When I tried to go back to weed more, after using the shelf list and discovering so many more books that were incredibly out of date, I found that there would be nearly nothing left if I was allowed to remove everything that was aged, according to IMPACT guidelines.

We did a lot of weeding that needed to be done--at last count, about 300 books have been removed from the non-AR nonfiction sections 000-350, also the 796s (which was the area I weeded for my project), the 500s and the 900s (which Lydia weeded). The librarian did about one fourth of the pulling of books from the shelves and I did all of the processing. I ripped off bar codes, wrote "discard" in two places in the book, and deleted the copy records from the circulation software. Then, we put the books up for "adoption" by staff and students, gladly giving them new life rather than throwing them "away." I do not regret the experience I have gained through this process--and I am not finished. I will go back one more Friday to finish up the work that I started because I do not want to leave the librarian with my unfinished work. I have about 40 books I've pulled from the 200s to 350s that need to be processed. I also need to share with Lydia the books I chose to replace some of what we have discarded. Some of the books we discarded do not need to be replaced either because there are already a number of strong titles in that subject or because they never were really appropriate for middle school anyway. One important factor that I considered when choosing books was the frugality factor--the books need to get a lot of bang for the buck. The books should be viable for as long as possible, and should be on subject matter that is interesting for the students in a format that is appealing. School librarians do not have a lot of money for books, so it is that much more important to choose books that will suit the needs and interests of the service population. A few of the books were chosen by Lydia and me, looking together, and the rest were chosen just by me. I know that Lydia will choose some of these if she gets the grant money next year. I have had a unique experience in this project, because, for me it was more than just an assignment; I went into the project wanting to help and to learn and to make a valuable difference in the library I chose. In those goals, I believe I have succeeded and I am satisfied with that.