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Author Topic: Weeding  (Read 123 times)

Will Peaden

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Weeding
« on: October 30, 2019, 02:02:34 pm »
One concern I had when talking about the collection policy was the idea that books would be weeded based on usage. This in and of itself is not too problematic but there were two areas of concern:

  • Books with poor metadata are likely to be undiscoverable. If they weren't on a reading list they wouldn't get flagged to students and if they are not findable academics and researchers may not know they exist. All this would lead to not only low usage but potentially no usage. Plus loans are only one indicator of use, we do have study spaces after all but that is a separate issue
  • Weeding took place in isolation from the rest of the community. Assuming that the BL has a copy for ILL is ok but does this make sense. Looking at WorldCat you can find all the libraries that locally hold it. For Aston, if it is a text that isn't readily available could we weed based on whether any other Birmingham HE library also holds the item?

These are just two collection decisions that affect a few titles at a time. As you scale these up they become more of a concern.
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Nick Williams

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Re: Weeding
« Reply #1 on: October 30, 2019, 02:22:08 pm »
We’re a bit odd at UoN Libraries in that although our weeded books are discarded, we retain the records on the LMS moving them to a separate library location called discards library and suppress them. Reviewing these recently I noticed that it wasn’t poor metadata quality that had led to their non-use but changing teaching priorities. Sadly, most of the last batch of discards I looked at were all Arts & Humanities books. So I suppose this means that our print collection management processes in this area work well. 
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Lynne D

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Re: Weeding
« Reply #2 on: October 30, 2019, 02:28:46 pm »
Quote from: Nick Williams on October 30, 2019, 02:22:08 pm
We’re a bit odd at UoN Libraries in that although our weeded books are discarded, we retain the records on the LMS moving them to a separate library location called discards library and suppress them.

We do something similar here at DMU, so books that leave the building are made status 'Withdrawn' (as opposed to 'On Order', or 'In Stock'), and suppressed from the catalogue. The bib records are therefore still available for cataloguing staff to see, should they so wish, and for re-use, should a discarded item be replaced by a new copy.

Lynne
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Will Peaden

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Re: Weeding
« Reply #3 on: October 30, 2019, 02:42:14 pm »
That's interesting. Last year we purchased a second-hand copy of a book only to discover that we discarded in the first place! I don't suppose keeping records would have changed this. However, from a historical point of view knowing what passed through our collections might have some use.
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