I’ve been a school librarian for almost two decades, and one thing I’ve noticed is that people generally fall into one of two camps when it comes to weeding library collections. Either a person approaches weeding like I do—with great enthusiasm and a desire to clean up the collection and make it more accessible for students, make the space more inviting, create places for displays, and secure additional library funding. Or they approach weeding with great dread and trepidation, if at all, afraid that they are going to throw away something that someone might need someday, afraid that they may never get the funding needed to replace weeded books, and afraid of possible pushback from teachers or parents about the process.
Having moved around a lot in my career and worked in dozens and dozens of libraries, I’ve never entered a school library anywhere across the country that did not need some level of weeding or collection maintenance. It’s one of those activities that many people tend to put off and not do on a very regular basis, which can create a backlog of material that needs to be closely examined and considered for weeding.
The Reality of Aging Collections
In my new district, I came across a very similar scenario. After running a district-wide collection analysis, I determined that our average collection age across 63 campuses was 2006—almost 20 years old. This stems from a variety of factors, and it’s more of a cultural mindset of wanting to hang on to something “just in case.” Many of our campuses are staffed by paraprofessionals who aren’t trained to weed, who don’t feel empowered to weed, and possibly have a scarcity mindset when they have no idea if they’re going to have additional funding to replace some of those books.
There’s also an outdated mindset that having a large library with more books is better, and this is something that I strongly disagree with. I feel like having more library books makes your collection crowded, bloated, hard to navigate, and usually way older than it needs to be. When students and staff have to sift through pages and pages of catalog results because you have 37 books on the Grand Canyon, or they cannot find a book that they want on the shelf because the books are so jam-packed in there that they’re unable to flip through the covers to browse, you have way too many books.
Several states have taken on the enormous task of publishing standards for collection development, including number of books per student and how many books would be ideal in each genre, dewey area, or for elementary versus secondary students. I encourage everyone to look up some of these standards even if they’re from a state that is not your own, just to give you an idea of what an actual number of books that you need per student might be. That’s a really good place to start, and I can tell you that the vast majority of school library collections are way too large, way too old, and are contributing to low circulation and a feeling among students that their library is not for them.
I worked with my Follett rep to turn our Titlewise analyses into actionable steps for reducing overall collection age, and I did some back of the napkin math to come up with reasonable weeding targets. Green in column G means a school either reached its goal or made significant progress, and will be eligible for District funding for new library books in 2025-2026.
The Circulation Reality
One of my dream reports that I wish an integrated library system vendor could create for me is a calculation of what percentage of each school’s library collection actually circulates each year or over a number of years. I would imagine in that in over even a 5-year period, far less than 50% of a collection actually gets checked out. If you look at just this past year, I’d wager less than 25% of the collection checks out.
Think about it—graphic novels are going to get checked out, especially at the secondary level. Fiction has its moments, some genres move more than others. If you have your fiction section genrefied, you probably have a pretty good sense of which genres are the most popular: typically fantasy, horror, romance, sometimes sports. For elementary students, the everybody (PLEASE stop calling them Easy!!!) section could be one of your most popular sections since younger students tend to be more enthusiastic about checking out books.
Nonfiction, if it’s curated for high-interest type of materials and all includes the 5 kinds of nonfiction, may get quite a bit of usage, especially from those curious students who just want to learn more or maybe prefer factual material to fiction. Nonfiction can also be also heavily used for class projects and can be very helpful for research assignments. However, if those collaborations aren’t happening and teachers aren’t having students use books from the library for their class assignments, it’s entirely possible the nonfiction collection is just sitting there—a great deal of it collecting dust and not being used.
Our Collection Crew Solution
When I moved into our district, one of the things that I learned is that in addition to weeding, many of our collections had not been inventoried in many years. So running reports to identify titles for weeding in this case just didn’t seem like it was a good use of time—we’d be spending a great deal of our time hunting down books that haven’t been on the shelves in many years that are still showing up in the catalog just because of a lack of consistent inventory.
Toward the end of the school year, I started extending an invitation to our licensed teacher librarians to form what I like to call a collection crew. This crew would go to a school over the summer, usually for 2 or 3 days, to thoroughly weed and inventory the entire collection. I ended up with seven to eight wonderful people who decided to spend some of their summer with us doing some of this work. Fortunately, we have five Title One elementary schools that are currently running a pilot with teacher librarians—this is a 3-year program and we are entering year two. Many of our collection crew members are those pilot teacher librarians.
This is a terrific experience in team building, building rapport, enhancing communication, working together, and having a great deal of fun while we got a lot of really hard work done. I worked with our warehouse team to put what they call Gaylords—but what I call giant bins—into each school to collect those discarded books. After getting principal permission and ensuring the air conditioning was going to be turned on the days that we were working, our team got to work.
The “Ugly Weed” Method
We did what I like to call an “ugly weed,” which is where we go through the shelves and we look for any books that have really brown pages, really worn spines, are clearly out of date, or clearly have not been used in a long time. One test I like to use for this is the dust test—if the top of a book is covered in a layer of dust, chances are it hasn’t been out of that shelf or in a child’s backpack in a very long time. We dispensed with the reports and just did a visual weed, knowing that many of these collections need to have at least one-third of their books removed to make space for new titles.
We were able to weed three of our elementary schools this summer, and we have plans to do several more smaller weeding projects on Saturdays during the fall and spring semester, and then again next summer. I’ll provide some links below for communication that I gave out to our principals and our collection crew process that we use for our librarians that go into these schools.
Collection Crew Invitation for Principals
The Bigger Picture
Ideally, if you’ve been maintaining your collection, you weed a small bit or section of the books at a time, discarding, recycling, repurposing, or giving away library books that no longer meet your needs. In our situation, we had such a huge number of books that we needed to be ruthless and toss those books into bins and get them off of campus as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Once this large weeding process is over with, the paraprofessional or the teacher librarian at that campus can then go into a refreshed, renewed space with lots of books with their covers facing out, lots of room to navigate, lots of open space that they haven’t had in a very long time. They’ll be able to continue weeding in small doses as the years go on.
Key Takeaways for Your Weeding Journey
- Start with relationship building: One tip for anyone else who might be new to a school or to a district—wait until the end of your first year before you even start to think about weeding. You never know when there might be a section of really old books that have been used by a grade level for years, or that are a teacher’s favorite, or that might be requested.
- Communication is crucial: I encourage you to feel empowered to communicate with your administrators, communicate with your teachers, communicate with your families, and begin that weeding process, especially if you’ve been putting it off for a while.
- Think visual impact: While it’s tempting to go into a library that’s new to you that needs a great deal of collection development and weeding, I recommend spending that first year building relationships and curating all those positive feelings toward the library before you begin taking on what is undeniably a very disruptive task that will make the library look and feel very different (probably better, but still different).
Change is hard, and weeding represents a potentially fraught process if not handled professionally, diplomatically, and transparently.
I encourage you to take a fresh look at your collection and see if there are books that are no longer meeting the needs of your students. Good luck with your weeding journey, and please reach out or make comments here on the post if you have any questions or if you’d like additional information!
Did you run an inventory after doing the “Ugly Weed”? Sounds like a great way to build a strong community between the district’s librarians!
Hi Rae!
Yep – we simultaneously completed an inventory while we weeded. Our Bib Services manager uploads MARC records to vendors for analysis every September, so while we know the # of books we weeded this summer, we will see how effective we were in bringing down the collection age in just a few weeks :)
We brought down ages of these school’s libraries by an average of 4 years:
One school went from an average publication date of 1999 to 2004!
Another went from 2004 to 2007!
The last went from 2006 to 2010!
Imagine how the collection age will continue to decrease as we continue weeding and adding brand-new titles :)
As a librarian, I think people have the misconception that every book is undeniably valuable in perpetuity. While I do believe books and thus reading are very important, not all books need to be in every library. The truth is libraries have finite space and scope. Library collections are not static and are not supposed to be. If that were true, we’d all have the same books from the 1910s! Just because a library gets rid of a book does not mean the book ceases to exist in the world. You can usually find it somewhere if it is really needed. (Which it isn’t because it’d be on the back on the shelf if it had use!) Focusing on the second life for the books after weeding would be a better use of time and energy. :)