October 2025
Quick Facts
- All staff can identify out-of-date and superseded content during materials movement or catalog searches.
- For most items that are updated annually or regularly, MCL circulates the current and previous edition and discards any earlier editions
- Exceptions include reference copies and irregularly updated titles
- Discard superseded editions, stamp them “ withdrawn”, and send them to OPS in a crate with an FOL streamer.
Procedure
These subject areas should be regularly reviewed to discard editions older than the two most current years.
- Career, resume
- Field Guides (birds, flowers, etc)
- Medical Guides (drug, prescription, etc)
- College and Scholarship Guides (Fiske, Peterson’s)
- NOLO Guides (legal, social security, etc)
- Tax Guides
- Travel Guidebooks (Frommer’s, Lonely Planet, Rick Steves etc.)
- Test Prep Guides (AP tests, SAT, GED, ASVAB etc)
- Social media & web-based technology
- Value Guides (Coin, Guns, Stamps, etc)
Example:
The Library owns 9 copies of the 2024 edition of Eyewitness Travel Seville and Andalucia, and 6 copies of the 2022 edition. The 2018 edition that is still circulating should be discarded, even if it has circulated recently.
Outdated materials which have no new editions or have ceased publication
- Some titles cease publication and the last edition MCL owns is outdated.
- Example: You find a copy of Peterson's How to Get Money for College 2021 on the shelf at your location in 2025.
- Check the item out to a Decision Shelf admin account for evaluation by a Regional Librarian or other IS staff member, who will see if there is a more recent edition that can be ordered.
- Some outdated titles are kept when there is nothing more current available to purchase. Example: Paddling Pacific Northwest Whitewater is from 2016, but it is kept because there is nothing newer on this topic and it covers an Oregon subject.
Duplicates
Now that the collection floats across all locations, duplicates are unlikely to cluster at a branch. Duplicate copy weeding for items with lower circulation is handled by IMMS. Duplicate issues at your location can be fixed by adjusting your maximum copies setting in your branch’s IMMS configuration. If IMMS has sent both a 2025 edition and a 2024 edition of the same title, you can send the older one back to OPS by using the “Send to Central sorting” option on the IMMS device.