African American Paperback Weeding Project

As part of collection maintenance, I ran weeding reports for all of the adult collections. After doing so it was obvious that the African American Paperback collection wasn't circulating very much. Many of the items in the collection had never been checked out, and those that had circulated tended to be in very poor condition.

 

It was my theory that being separated into its own collection was causing the materials to be overlooked and therefore under utilized. I discussed this with Mary Lopez and Jacki Potratz--who encouraged me to heavily weed the collection as a starting place and to investigate if it was worth it to have a separate collection since new paperbacks were not being added. As a result, I decided to dismantle the collection.

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I started by looking at the condition of each book and determining if it 1) could stay as is but be moved to another collection, 2) needed to be repaired before being moved, or 3) needed to be removed from the collection altogether. Books that weren't weeded were relabeled and updated in the catalog to belong to the general fiction collection.

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Weeding, as part of collection maintenance, is supported by  the ALA Core Competencies:

• 2B. Apply the concepts, issues, and methods of collection management, which entails the lifecycle of materials from evaluation to long-term preservation and other curative practices (including but not limited to acquisitions, selection, purchasing, processing, storage, and de-selection).