1. Adrienne Radzvickas Lincoln College
Weed ‘Em and Reap
Adrienne Radzvickas
Lincoln College

2. Lincoln College Founded in 1865 as Lincoln University
Hybrid two- and four year degree institution
Two campuses approximately 30 miles apart
Has a new college president
Approximately 1000 FTE and increasing
Plan is to increase the number of four-year degrees
Lincoln was named after Abraham Lincoln in his lifetime.
Lincoln College

3. Started out with approximately 34,000 print books and no eBooks at that time. Shelf space in several sections (especially literature) was packed. New Library Director as of November She initiated the weeding project.
We now have approximately 120,000 eBooks in addition to our print collection.
McKinstry Library

4. Lincoln College Age of Collection
The vast majority of the collection was published in the 1960s and 1970s. The bulk of the collection was in Literature and History, neither of which are majors at the College. The amount of recently published books was negligible.
The majors at the college were: various Business degrees, Criminal Justice, Jazz Studies, General Studies, and pre-Nursing. What’s wrong with this picture?
One professor contacted the Library Director, and told her that a student used a book about the brain and the mind for her paper—published in All we could do was apologize.
Lincoln College Age of Collection

5. Weeding Criteria Weed duplicates of items.
If the material was published in the year 2000 or later, keep the item. (We’ve occasionally kept items from the 1990s if the material still seems relevant.)
If the material has ever circulated, keep it, unless the material is so dated to be useless.
Browses had not been used up to that point.
Weed items in poor condition.
Used the same query as Illinois College.
Started with duplicates of items as an icebreaker, which evolved into a discussion of what is a duplicate.
Publication dates used with judgement. For example, if all the biographies of President Kennedy were written in the 1960s, we won’t get rid of them all. We also made exceptions for “classic” works.
Historically circulated items often are still too dated to keep.
Many items in poor condition. Mention the unexpected weeding project—moldy books.
Weeding Criteria

6. Weeding Criteria Weed textbooks in the collection.
If the material is on the same subject as other items, keep the newer material and weed the older material.
Weed any materials that do not support our mission of being an academic library. (Collection developers in the past collected many materials as if we were a public library.)
If fewer than five copies were listed in OCLC, keep the item.
Offer books to the Last Copy in Illinois Project.
Same subject: for example, if we had ten biographies of a president, we would keep the newest ones.
In reality, we wound up not following some of the criteria (especially about age) in order to keep from completely decimating sections. We will need to re-weed the collection after we get more new books in.
Weeding Criteria

7. Unweeded vs. Weeded (Not the same shelf)
Weeded roughly 30 – 45 percent on average.
Unweeded vs. Weeded

8. Biggest challenge Keeping the patrons in mind
Image licensed under Creative Commons by CollegeDegrees360.
Often found books that I thought were interesting, but our collection is mainly for the benefit of the students.
Biggest challenge

9. Faculty Review Set up a review area similar to Illinois College’s
Most faculty refused to review
Other faculty tried to rescue books
Picture credit Wikivisual
Visual aids (that is, weeded books that really had to go) can help. Show old tech book.
Faculty Review

10. Withdrawing books Created a spreadsheet of withdrawn books
Batch withdrew books (“Pick and Scan”)
CARLI provides a list of withdrawn books with OCLC numbers, so used that to batch withdraw OCLC holdings
Part-time workers marked out library markings
Spreadsheet: first by hand, then by query of withdrawn items
Withdrawing books

11. Disposal of Discards Sent to Better World Books
First, only the books that BWB wanted
Later, sent all books that were within BWB’s criteria
Some maintenance staff were very upset that we were throwing out books. My boss was worried that their concern would spread across campus, so we changed our agreement with BWB.
Disposal of Discards

12. Statistics Too early for circulation data
Have withdrawn around 4500 books thus far
In Biographies, the average publication date of the books changed from 1967 to It’s an improvement, but we have a ways to go.
Would like to do a study on the circulation statistics over time.
Statistics

13. Even using the same circulation statistics, weeding projects will differ because the institutions differ.
Weeding should be looked at an ongoing process rather than a one-shot deal.
Conclusion