Weeding, or the removal or the deselection of obsolete, damaged, unneeded materials is to be considered an integral part of collection management. This procerss is important in order to keep the collection current, viable, and useful. Weeding will be an active and continuing process done by librarians to ensure that our collection meets the needs of our students, faculty, and staff. The weeding process is as important to the library collection as the selection process.
The purpose of weeding is to:
CONDITION - Materials in poor condition are prime candidates for replacement. Weed items which have the following defects:
CIRCULATION OR USE - Circulation reports on specific call number ranges across the print collection show the frequency of circulation and/or the most recent date the item has circulated. This report can be generated by the Technical Services head and distributed among the liaison librarians assigned.
Generally, items that have not circulated for the last five years and are not needed for reference should be evaluated for discard.
For more guidelines on weeding, please see the CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries
The documents below outlines specific guidelines and procedures you need to follow when you are doing weeding or deselection.