Sara Tompson, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and SLA-IL
Special Libraries Association
Physics, Astronomy, Mathematics Division
Gardening Tips for Painless Collection Weeding
June 7, 1999

(If no comments noted, the slide spoke for itself! See the slides on this Web site.)

Comments, Slide 1:

Hi! I�m Sara Tompson from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Library. I am also the President-Elect of the Illinois chapter of SLA.

I will be starting off today�s panel, to be followed by two librarians from NOAA, Doria Grimes and Steven Quillen.

This session is part of the "Practitioner�s Toolkit" track, and that is our aim -- to share with you our experiences with collection weeding, and lessons learned!

THANKS to our PAM Division Chair Brenda Corbin for arranging logistics on many levels to enable us to hold this panel!

Comments, Slide 2:

Doria and Steve reminded me that people always like to know from whence speakers come!

So, here are some links about Fermilab, SLA-IL and me. I will note here that I am a real world gardener -- share a plot at Fermilab with our Acquisitions Librarian, and also have containers at home!

This slides from this presentation will be up on my Web page after the conference.

The two pictures represent the study in contrasts that is Fermilab -- home of the Tevatron, a huge machine that is currently the world�s largest particle accelerator. The Tevatron, the large collaborative detector facilities, the fixed target experiments, and all the buildings that house Fermilab folks from buffalo herders to librarians to engineers to theoretical astrophysicists are set on 6,700 acres of restored prairie and woodlands!

The Tevatron collides protons and antiprotons to, via the occasional collision, yield smaller subatomic particles like the top quark.

Fermilab is a basic research lab the goal of which is to better understand subatomic particles as they exist now and as they existed near the birth of the universe.

Comments, Slide 3:

A special thanks to my friend Ron for working to get his company (Majors Scientific Books) to provide vendor sponsorship for this session!

Comments, Slide 4:

Okay, now I am going to share with you some of the useful weeding resources I culled from the library literature....

Some Library Weeding Citations
Prepared by Sara Tompson, Fermilab Library Administrator, 8/98
(Originally presented to Fermilab Library Advisory Committee

Definition:

• "Weeding is the removal of an item from the library�s active collection for the purpose of either discarding it or sending it to storage." Bonk, Wallace John and Rose Mary Magrill. Building Library Collections. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979, p. 314.

Why weed:

• "In libraries which do not pretend to become permanent depositories of all that has been published, weeding the collection becomes as important a part of the maintenance of the library as the initial selection." Bonk and Magrill, p. 314.
• "No library can possibly continue to hold all purchased materials, unless it is a library of record or regional and local agreements make it a library of last resort." Martin, Murray S. "Weeding or Deaccessioning?" Technicalities. Vol. 17, no. 7 (1997), p. 16.
• "Trying to save everything just in case someone, sometime, might want a low-use item is frustrating to both staff and clientele." Carey, Cathy. "Survival Weeding." Collection Building Vol. 10 no. 3-4 (1990), p. 20.
• "Weeding is a way to increase the effectiveness of the library because keeping seldom-used items casts a shadow on the newer, generally more useful titles." Carey, p. 20.
• One author likens a bibliophile to a "gourmand" (indiscriminate love of books) and a librarian weeding a collection to a "gourmet" (a selective lover of books)! In an article discussing her weeding project, she admits to being naturally a gourmand, but converting to a gourmet for the sake of her information service: "Bluntly, my responsibility to the quality of information I provide to our students is greater than my responsibility to the books qua books." Berson, Robin. "Schools of Thought: To Weed or Not to Weed." Wilson Library Bulletin vol. 69, no. 10 (June 1995), p. 71.

Weeding based on usage is a common library practice. A number of studies have supported this approach. See, for example:

• Trueswell, Richard W. "Growing Libraries: Who Needs Them? A Statistical Basis for the No-Growth Collection" in Farewell to Alexandria: Solutions to Space Growth and Performance Problems of Libraries. Daniel Gore, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976, pp. 72-104.
• Reed, Lawrence L. and Rodney Erickson. "Weeding: A Quantitative and Qualitative Approach." Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory. Vol. 17 (1993), pp. 175-181. (Usage data discussed on pp. 175-176).
• "One rule of thumb suggests that fewer than six circulations in one year makes a book a good candidate for discarding." Carey, p. 20. (NOTE that Fermilab is more conservative than this -- our criteria include 0 usage for 5+ years)
• "Although some...believe that everything in a research collection will eventually be of use to some researcher, simply circulation counts have repeatedly shown that a small proportion of any collection, especially of a large research collection, accounts for a large percentage of total circulation." Bonk and Magrill, p. 318.

Many in the library profession also advocate combining quantitative usage data with qualitative collection guidelines or policies and other guidelines. See, for example:

• Joswick, Kathleen E. and John P. Stierman. "Systematic Reference Weeding: A Workable Model." Collection Management Vol. 18, no. 1&2 (1993), pp. 103-117. "A collection development policy ...[should] provide a theoretical basis for weeding decisions." p. 107. (Fermilab Library is using our collection policy as a set of guidelines.)
• "Another consideration is whether a book is part of a series." Carey, p. 20. (Fermilab Library is following this.)

The books the Fermilab Library is weeding are the sorts typically weeded by other libraries, as noted in the literature, for example:

• "My harvest included excess copies of solid monographs, some books either too sophisticated or too simplified for my population, many �gift� books that never should have been entered into the collections, as well as the more predictable victims of weeding, the shabby, no-longer-accurate books." Berson, p. 72.
• "Library materials may be weeded because of their content...their physical condition...their use patterns...or a combination of these features....Duplicates of titles...[and]superseded editions of books might well be eliminated." Bonk and Magrill, p. 315-316.

Sometimes library customers panic or grow angry about weeding projects. See for example:

• Murray Martin�s discussion of the Library Friends group protesting at the San Francisco Public Library and the City Controller of Philadelphia assailing the Philadelphia Free Library (in his "Weeding or Deaccessioning?" article, cited above.)
• "Faculty members who are not invited to participate and who do not understand the process used [in weeding] tend to distrust the process and develop negative feelings about it." Reed and Erickson, p. 179.

In conclusion: "By having a clear, defensible procedure, even faculty who are opposed to weeding can be made to see the necessity of judicious weeding for effective collection development." Reed and Erickson, p. 179.

Comments, Slide 5:

An adage of our current venue of electronic resources aptly summarizes a key weeding philosophy: Just in time is better than Just in Case -- don�t leave items moldering on the shelves JUST IN CASE someone needs them at some distant, unknown time!

Comments, Slide 6:

The Quantitative approach -- also know as -- if it is not used, its a weed!

Comments, Slide 7:

The Quantitative approach -- also know as -- if it is not used, its a weed!

Slide 10 is our Library's guidelines:

"The purpose of the Fermilab Library collection of resources and services is to provide information to further the mission of the laboratory.

Providing information to support the organizational mission includes providing access to information resources and services in the following discipline areas:

• Accelerator physics
• Astrophysics
• Business and management
• Computer science
• Cryogenics
• Engineering, specifically -
• civil
• electrical
• electronic
• mechanical
• Environmental safety and health
• High energy physics
• Nuclear physics
• Theoretical physics
• Core science and general reference texts
• Other areas as warranted

Resources and services will be evaluated before purchase, and as part of periodic weeding, based on:

• Relevance
• Usage
• Cost-effectiveness
• Currency of material
• Authority (i.e., is it a trusted source)
• Coherence of series."

B) Additional Guidelines:

• Do not break up proceedings runs
• Retain books by authors of renown
• Retain books by authors with Fermilab connections
• Avoid multiple copies of all but very heavily used works (i.e. weed duplicates of
• most items)
• Retain books by renowned authors
• Retain book if it is the only representative of a topic (until we can buy
• more/newer books)

Consider whether or not Fermilab is the only OCLC holding location (lesser consideration than the above, as we are not charged with archival responsibility, nor do we have as broad a mission as a university library)

Comments, Slide 12:

This begins the lessons learned section! I don�t want to go into excruciating detail of our difficulties. I will simply say I worked hard to get my boss� and her boss� support, and did. I also got the Library Advisory Committee�s buy-in. I should have worked harder with staff and with the whole user population.

Comments, Slide 15:

There was not as much material on the Web on weeding as I expected there would be. And much of it is directed to public libraries. Still, here are some cites that I found useful. The links worked as of the end of May! (See slide)

END