Reference BackTalk: A Time To Weed
Decluttering print collections
By Lauren Lampasone -- Library Journal, 5/1/2008
Judging from the number of decluttering guides and storage reorganization consultants, weeding in other (nonlibrarian) areas of our lives is big business. And it should be big business in libraries, too—especially regarding print reference, which must now compete with online resources.
What print reference should you toss, and what should you keep? As with spring cleaning, you may resolve to be ruthless but find yourself hesitant and overly sentimental when it comes to decision time. You know that once you get rid of something, you will have the perfect occasion to use it, whether to answer an unusual reference question or to match those amazing shoes you found at 30 percent off.
After visiting over 40 local libraries for weeding projects, I've become something of a life coach when it comes to refreshing reference collections. Here are some tips on how best to conquer reference clutter.
HAVE A PLAN Does your collection development policy have a section on deselection? This is the best way to protect your library from challenges, and it should serve as a constant reaffirmation of the purpose and goals of the collection.
MAKE A LIST Create a list of core print reference titles and electronic resources in major subject areas. Refer to it as necessary.
AVOID DISTRACTIONS How many times have you caught yourself looking up entries you find interesting in books you are trying to weed? (Or maybe that's just me.) Stay on task.
BOOKS ARE FOR USE Just like the too-tight pants in the back of your closet: if they haven't really fit your collection in over two years, they probably never will.
KEEP CURRENT And what about that shiny shirt? If it's from the mid-1990s, well, honestly, you should be embarrassed that you still have it.
GO PAPERLESS You don't even have to invest in a scanner. More and more government agencies and nonprofits are making their pamphlets, applications, and directories available online. Bookmark them and then print only as needed.
START SMALL Don't tackle the whole reference section at once. Break it up into manageable chunks. Start with ready reference and the 000s. The 300s might need a whole morning (and some strong coffee). Do a quick sweep of the 500s, and take a good, long look at the 600s. Here are a just few tips on what you might weed.
Letting go
The paradox of the print reference collection is that it must be close at hand and yet openly available to users. If it's too close, patrons cannot access it without invading the librarian's personal space. But move it too far away, and the librarian falls backward when trying to reach it while conducting telephone reference. Web resources like Credo keep ready reference at everyone's fingertips—and allow for a judicious weeding of print reference. Credo, formerly Xreferplus, provides quick lookup of bilingual dictionaries, quotations, and conversions and a full-text collection of up to 298 reference works in a variety of subjects. The search interface is clean and simple—something that makes everyone happy.
If you're worried about putting print indexes to poetry on the chopping block, remember that the recently redesigned online version of Columbia Granger's World of Poetry makes looking for poetry in anthologies a snap. It contains poems in over ten languages, 250,000 in full text, as well as commentaries and biographical information for numerous poets. Also in the 000s are books on personal computers and the Internet. A general rule of thumb here: if it has images of a Netscape browser window, throw it out.
In the 300s, you might unearth print relics such as Cambridge's Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. This yellowing tome comes in handy whenever an inquisitive student comes in looking for the number of librarians in 1900 (3000) or the population of New Jersey in 1790 (184,139). But you can get rid of it now that the whole thing can be found online from Census.gov.
Also in the 300s, you may find books of statistics on the Hispanic experience in the United States—important to have at hand, especially in urban settings. But with a population that is growing and changing so rapidly, print sources go out of date quickly. Pew Hispanic, a project of the Pew Research Center, does a good job of keeping up with these stats.
In the 500s, make a clean sweep of books on climate changes or natural disasters from more than a few years ago. Genetics and related subjects also need to be current to be of any use. As for consumer health material in the 600s, many free web sites, e.g., MedlinePlus, provide dependable health information. And for all your tsunami and stem-cell information needs: Science Reference Center, part of EBSCOhost, combines the authority of reference books with the currency of periodicals. It even includes image and video search along with RSS alerts, all must-haves for the YouTube generation. Or the easily distracted librarian.
Author Information
Lauren Lampasone is Senior Librarian at the New York Public Library