No abstract

insights-library-archivaland-information-sciences.

This paper will provide an adaptable roadmap for weeding a monograph collection at a small academic library. When starting straight out of library school as the first Collection Development Librarian for the St. Edward's University library in July 2010, I was confronted with a monograph collection that had never been weeded in any systematic way. As a small liberal arts university library, it is not our mission to collect comprehensively but rather to support the current curriculum, which is focused on social issues in a global context. Yet, there we were with a dusty, dated, unused collection filling the shelves. The original goals of the weeding project were to remove outdated and unused materials from the collection and to discover areas where materials should be replaced or built upon. As will be discussed, a new more pressing goal presented itself during the course of this project. I will outline the process I went through to develop criteria for weeding the collection and how these criteria were adapted to different subject areas based on the curriculum of a given department. I will highlight the tools I used to generate lists of items to be weeded after the criteria were set and how to keep track of progress using SpringShare LibGuides. Lastly, I will cover the most unanticipated challenge in managing this project: the human element, in the form of both faculty and librarian colleagues reluctant to weed. The project is ongoing with the goal of having an entire collection review completed by May 2012. IntroductionSt. Edward's University is a small, Catholic liberal arts school that has grown in size and ambition over the last 10 years without the campus library exactly matching or reflecting this growth. The curriculum had been completely overhauled to focus on current social issues and globalization and library research within these areas. Other disciplines' information needs had either migrated online or shifted away from monographs entirely. The library collection, while weeded piecemeal over the years, had never been reviewed systematically to reflect these new developments in the curriculum. This was partially because no collection development policy existed to dictate criteria for weeding and partially because prior to the creation of my position there had been no collection development librarian project managing and pushing typically back-burner collection maintenance to the forefront. The original goal of this project was to create a more relevant, highly used print collection, but then we were thrown the happy, though stressful curveball of a donation to renovate the library. In the new learning commons space there will be approximately half the space that we currently have for the print collection so this project has taken on a greater sense of urgency recently. We would not be provided any off-site storage for the rest of the collection and