What are commonly used and accepted methods to weed a recently developed collection?

In 2010, we moved our Young Adult collection to a new space, during which we weeded it. Within the last two years, the room has filled up quickly as we have expanded the collection but, as is bound to happen, we have run out of room. I feel that some of the traditional weeding methods would not work in this situation (such as age of the item or circulation stats).

What are some of the best methods to apply in this situation?

KatieR

• collection-development
• weeding

Comments

Answer by dsalo

Weeding lends itself to acronyms, for some reason, as you doubtless already know:

• CREW: Continuous Review, Evaluation, and Weeding
• MUSTIE (part of CREW): Misleading, Ugly, Superseded, Trivial, Irrelevant, or Elsewhere
• WORST: Worn out, Out of date, Rarely used, System cannot support (e.g. outmoded delivery systems like CD-ROMs), Trivial

In your specific case, I might pay special attention to the U and E in MUSTIE and the W in WORST? I've heard several youth-services librarians say that removing much-abused, tired-looking materials increased circulation of the other materials significantly.

Good luck! This is a difficult problem to have.

Comments

• Joe: Of course, if it's worn out, I'd assume that would be a sign that it's a potential candidate for replacing vs. weeding to free up space. (but you'd want to look at circulation stats to make that call)

Answer by Fisher

This may be a bit obvious, but do you have any duplicates to weed? Extra copies of Twilight, Harry Potter, etc? Or how about series that you don't need to keep the entirety of (though that falls under the 'elsewhere' in MUSTIE)?

Comments

• KatieR: I have done this -- but instead of withdrawing duplicates, I made their status "unavailable" and stored them in a backroom. Many of our duplicates are classics so they often show up on school reading lists, so I didn't want to completely get rid of them!

Answer by M. Alan Thomas II

Some selectors looking to add a great deal of content (e.g., during a major development) will take the opportunity to buy long series that they wouldn't have the space for otherwise. If you find yourself dealing with such a collection, you might want to take into consideration that a long series that takes up a lot of shelf space will attract only a single audience for that space; in terms of serving the community, it might be inferior to a lot of shorter series or stand-alone works that will attract a wider variety of readers even if they're doing the same circ figures per item.

Admittedly, you may not have the opportunity to add such a long series at a later date when you have less free space to work with and it will prevent adding many smaller items, but if you can't justify the trade-off at the later date, why is it justifiable now?

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