I have got gardening on the brain, do you? It is exciting to see anything green push up through the dirt, even a weed! But soon enough, we know that for the sake of the garden, those weeds have to go. So goes it with our library collections too. As we remove the clutter, the truly good content can breathe, can shine through more brightly. This is the time of year when many of our readers are doing inventory and weeding collections, so this post seems timely. The key question always is….which books are weeds, and many a librarian are quite tortured by it! Deep down, I think librarians absolutely know something needs to be weeded, they just need absolution for discarding any book. In many cases, the act of discarding is painful, and fraught with indecision. Some people simply cannot do it!

If you have been reading our blog for some time, you have heard of Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, two light-hearted Michigan librarians best known for their Awful Library Books blog.  They also offer Advice to Reluctant Weeders Here. You might want to also check out their Hurdles to Weeding.

Good to go, or do you need to go deeper? Other resources that may help include:

• Weeding Tips: the Basics (Booklist Online)
• CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries (pdf)
• Weeding Library Collections: A Selected Annotated Bibliography for Library Collection Evaluation
• ALA Weeding and Collection Evaluation Factsheet

Image credit: http://tinyurl.com/q3vaodr, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0