May 2024

Quick Facts

• The goal of weeding is to maintain the collection size by removing outdated, damaged, and unpopular items to make room for new materials.
• Weeding allows us to assess our material and apply a reflective practice to provide the community with high quality material that represent people authentically.
• We are adding new material all the time, so we need to make room for new items by removing the titles that are no longer serving our community.
• Weeding is everyone’s responsibility!

Procedure

The library is conducting routine weeding for:

• Condition
• Content
  • Superseded and duplicates
  • Irrelevant, inaccurate and obsolete
• Circulation

The Regional Librarian Team coordinates weeding in their region according to branch need, staffing capacity, and the ability to transport, sort, and process discards systemwide. 

Decision making grounded in professional judgment

• Professional judgment, not personal opinion guides the decision making process for collection maintenance.
• It is also human decision making, we need to have awareness of our individual positionality and our implicit bias.