Deep in the Weeds: Faculty Participation in a Large Scale Deselection Project

A Large-Scale Collection Review with Faculty Collaboration: A Comprehensive View

“…The interface design for the form was greatly influenced by CSUF's collection review experience with faculty. 23 The Library's process was designed to honor all faculty requests, but project staff wanted to design a retention request form that would not make it too easy for faculty to select a vast number of books for retention. However, the form that was developed may have been overly burdensome.…”

“…9 DeMars, Roll, and Phillips describe their library's experience with including faculty in a deselection project at California State University, Fullerton (CSUF). 10 Their library provided circulation data to faculty and permitted them to contest some weeding decisions. After the initial pilot project in which faculty retained 1,716 books out of 1,744 (over 98 percent retention), the library modified the faculty review process to mandate providing a reason for retention requests.…”

“…They comment, "This analysis revealed what many in the library already knew: much of the print collection was out of date and had not circulated in some time." 11 CSU, Stanislaus also used GreenGlass for the trial project for the political science collection, as described in Held's "Curating, Not Weeding." 12 The library used GreenGlass to generate review files, and librarians physically reviewed every title on the list afterwards to decide what to withdraw.…”

Collection weeding: Innovative processes and tools to ease the burden

“…In describing how to coordinate with professorial faculty, Busch et al (2018) described using spreadsheets that were grouped by Library of Congress (LC) call number to create smaller sets of titles that more directly related to specific faculty areas. DeMars et al (2019) noted that they augmented their use of spreadsheets with the creation of an online application that was intended to streamline the process. However, it had to be modified to prevent faculty from "arbitrarily voting to retain every book" (p. 29).…”