Today was a paper-pushing kind of day. It is one of the things I both dread and love in the same breath: I love the organization and productivity and mental focus you can achieve in paperwork, but only if the tasks serve a relevant and useful purpose. Thankfully, today was just the kind of desk work I love!
Yesterday, I began inventory on the biographies, as my assigned part of the collection to weed. I have already looked at a specific section of the biographies with my SLIS 720 Collection Analysis assignment, but this week's task spans the entirety of Ravenel's biography collection.
Today, we actually weeded about 100 books! It started out with a "Shelf List" generated by the Follett software. Cindy printed out a list of the whole collection and brought me a highlighter. I kindly (I hope) asked if the program generated Excel spreadsheets as this data could be manipulated easily to narrow the around 1,400 titles to just the potentially outdated or non-useful texts. Thankfully, the program does, so I got to work. Using the conditional formatting tool, I first labelled texts according to dates established by Karen R Lowe's weeding formulas, the "queen of weeding" according to Cindy. Then, I conditionally formatted texts with less than two circulations in the last five years. I had to play around with the sorting filters until I was content that both the oldest and least used texts were in the top 10% of my spreadsheet. From there, it was much more hands-on and slightly more tedious. I first looked at the 0-checkout texts in the "red" and "orange" date ranges ("weed"/"aging") and entered the barcodes into Destiny to see how many lifetime checkouts the text had and when the text was added to the collection.
Interesting trends started to happen. Almost all of the texts that were both old and unused were entered into the collection on April 28, 2006! I asked Toni what might have caused this, as she and Cindy were in charge of the library at that time. Toni remembered that the office and the side storage room were FULL of boxes and boxes of books that had never been added to the collection by the previous librarian. 😞 The timeline both she and Cindy remembered seemed to fit with this date in the catalog. Evidently, these texts were unnecessary purchases (donations?) to the collection that were never offered nor advertised as part of the collection. This made pulling texts fairly easy for several of the books to be weeded. The second trend we noticed were for pop icons or sport athletes that were popular for a short time and were no longer relevant to today's children. For one collection of texts published in the 1990s, we asked a handful of students, "Do you know ___?" Some names like Enrique Iglesias, Brandy, N*Sync, Hillary Duff, etc, were named. Besides blank looks, shaken heads, and "no"s, one student said, "These aren't the people we study! I know about James Madison!" 😆😆😆 Those got weeded as well.
The last task we completed was the actual pulling of the books and removing from the collection. After I collected the books onto a cart, Cindy took a last thumb through each of the texts, determining if the text was still valuable despite the catalog (perhaps teachers use the book or she used the book in the library) and to determine potential books to send to other teachers or areas of the school that would find more use for the texts (old art or music books, role models for guidance, etc). All but three were determined "weed" material. The actual process of removing these texts from the catalog was as simple as a scan! Tomorrow we begin the process of pulling barcodes and other identifiers from the books themselves before looking at how to improve the biography collection moving forward.
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