What to do with the weeded books?

During our secondary library weed, the ES librarian and I decided to weed our professional library as well.  We now had several thousand weeded books.  What to do with all those books?  A few ideas below....

BOOK ART

The middle school art class made these amazing creations which are now on display in our library.

	We keep all our thicker books in a box in the back room so art students can practice carving as they work towards a final creation.

BOOK TEA
We hosted a book tea for teachers and staff.  We worried we would be challenged for giving away so many "good" books.  But, teachers were grateful.  Students also took books.  Once Chinese student came by and took every book on China we had weeded.  Some staff members shopped for Christmas for their families.  The book "Too Cool to Get Married" was put in a teachers' mailbox by a fellow staff member and is still circulating around the school as a joke.

Other things we did with our books:

1. Our high school Service Learning groups took boxes of books for their organizations (orphanages, schools, etc.)
2. A parent working for an international aid organization took many of our fiction books for libraries she is helping to set up throughout the country.
3. One of our secretaries has parents who run a school and she took several boxes of books
4. Last Resort: Once we gave away everything we could, whatever was left went to our general services office.  They sell them in bulk at an auction where they are then resold or recycled.

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...

What to do with old library books?

Book Art!

In collaboration with our middle school art teacher (99.9% of the credit goes to him- I just donated the books) we have new art displays in our library!
When I arrived this year, I found our non-fiction section to be very outdated.  The massive book weed resulted in several big, thick books that were perfect for recycled book art.  The MS students worked very hard to create these masterpieces: