Weeding Books

The first step in the gentrification process was to weed books; a difficult process for a librarian!

I decided to run a report of books that were more than 10 years old and had not checked out in over 2 years.  The results returned 5141 books. 

We didn't weed them all, but we looked at every book on the list and weeded the majority of them.

Did we "judge a book by it's cover?"  Absolutely!  We also looked at if the pages were dusty, moldy, if the pictures and images looked boring or even if the text looked boring or too hard.  I kept a couple old "Readers Digest" photojournalism books and a few classics.   I also kept about half of poetry to avoid decimating the section. However, for the most part, our weeding list was accurate and we could see why the books hadn't checked out and likely never would have.

I tasked my assistants with the weed of our "Bangladesh Collection" because even though the majority of it rarely circulates, I didn't want to throw out any historical relics, popular authors or books that can't be replaced. They were the experts in this area.

Our library collection has now shrunk in size.  We have 12,455 books, down from approximately 17,000 we started the year with.

Mr. Shoyab and "The Ream of Weeding"

Ms. Shuborna pulling old books

Me with one of many wedding carts

Things got a little backed up at times...