Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Going thru my shelf list...
Holy cow! If I removed everything from my high school Dewey section that was published before 1990, I might have a dozen books left!!! Seriously, though, the elementary Dewey is in pretty good shape, but the high school section is a disaster. I knew this when I took over the job; the previous librarian had told me she didn't have time to weed & update it. Plus, her background was elementary ed. It was also interesting to see how much fiction we have compared to Follett & Wilson suggested levels - WAY more than they think we should have. I know the elem. fiction & easy books need to be weeded, but will try to get to that at some point. Right now I really just want to focus on the HS Dewey, and try to get more HS students (and teachers) to use that section. Our school is working on curriculum mapping, and I'll be asking teachers for recommendations in the next few weeks, as we begin thinking of spring ordering for our curriculum.
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I sometimes wonder if the "no weeding" and the copyright age of our collections is a reflection on the one room school house attitude and people thinking that withdrawing books is a waste of tax payer dollars (um...but if no one is reading them and they are hiding the diamonds in the rough so to speak then isn't that a waste of tax payer dollars and inefficiency on our part as well)? I like that you are looking at your schools curriculum maps to help with your collection development.
ReplyDeleteWhen I started this job 5 years ago, there had been very little weeding done except for condition of books. I have been weeding pretty heavily since then using Karen Lowe's method. We started with a collection of around 14,000 books for our enrollment of 430. After weeding all sections except the Biography section, we are down to 12,637. Many books were left that should still be weeded due to age, but without the funds in the amounts that we need to do so, I've left them on the shelves. I agree with Mrs. B in her posting above. I feel like if I took everything off the shelves that really should be weeded, I'd have very little for my students to choose from.
ReplyDeleteWhen I crunch the numbers, I have 30 books per student now. This number is very deceiving when I consider the number of books that should be weeded yet, but haven't for the reasons above. I am very excited to continue this weeding and ordering more books that will aid our students and teachers in the curriculum areas. I know this is a continuing process and it's exciting to see the progress! Our library now has a 1994 average as compared to the 1988 average when I arrived.
I liked marking everything on paper first! It takes the pain out of deciding at the shelf. However, our shelves will be bare when we remove all the marked items.
ReplyDeleteI was also shocked to find how old our plays are and that new ones have not been purchased for a very long time.
I feel like our non-fiction is so ugly and unappealing so I can't wait to see the results of my weeding and replacing!