Excellent advocacy job here.

While everyone knows libraries purchase
new books for their shelves, not everyone is aware libraries also
regularly remove books from their shelves.

Maybe your library has a publicly posted policy against taking any book donations (or most). Maybe your library’s collection is 100% based on book donations. Libraries do fall across the spec…

With storage spaces filled with works that may never be shown, some museums are rethinking the way they collect art, and at least one is ranking what it owns.

Disclaimer: My opinions do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of my employer. I wanted to write about weeding today, inspired by the ALCTS eForum being generously overseen by Alex McCall…

Two staff at East Lake library suspended after discovery of bogus loans, claimed to be a defence against automatic culling of unread books

On the blog Awful Library Books, two librarians highlight texts that seem self-evidently ridiculous.

With five neighborhood library branches set to be renovated, what happens to all those books? Free Library provides an answer.

Keeping a printed book in a campus library comes with steep costs. How are campus libraries evolving?

When librarians from the Berkeley Public Library were examining books that had not been checked out for three years to determine which ones to keep and which to discard, they reviewed “The Housefly: Its Natural History, Medical Importance, and Control,” written by Luther S. West in 1951. It was retained. So was “A Guide to Shrubs for Coastal California,” by Harry Morton Butterfield, published in 1980, and the memoir “The Peacocks of Baboquivari,” by Erma J. Fisk, which came out in 1987. But the librarians agreed that Yingxing Song’s “Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century,” described by its publisher as a “1637 classic on the history of traditional Chinese technology,” didn’t need to remain in circulation. Neither did “Creating Color: a Dyer’s Handbook,” by Judy Anne Walter or “Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey across America,” by Lily Burana. Some more modern and popular authors got the boot, too. “The Angela Y. Davis Reader,” was withdrawn, as was “Race Matters” by Cornel West. Berkeley author Michael Lewis got culled as well: the librarians decided it had too many copies of “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine,” and got rid of a few. (Eight remain in circulation.) These are some of […]

To Save or Not to Save...  My old mentor, Tom Powers, used to say that the business of archives is not just about saving things, but also t...

Getting rid of books can feel uncomfortable and look bad to community members, but careful weeding is key to the health of a collection.

CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries (PDF) revised in 2012 to include a section on e-books! CREW: Addendum on e-books (PDF) addendum to CREW 2008 edition Teaching Resources: Weeding with the CREW Method (PPT) Attack with CREW Public (PPT) Making Your Case Weeding Exercise Public (Word) Weeding Case Study Public (Word) Revised and Updated by Jeanette Larson, 2008