Okay, that title may be overselling it just a tad.

For sure, we promise fun! Libraries are ALWAYS fun topics to discuss!! Plus, we have so many interesting Guest Hosts, we talk about cool stuff – it would be pretty impossible to not have fun!

And we haven’t even mentioned the wonderful assistance Official Office Dog Lady Grey provides. She’s usually a quiet presence in the studio as we record – but her influence is real.

And you need to keep building skills to continue to be successful in your job. Plus, (see below) we will be offering Continuing Education Clock Hours/CE credits for working your way through the education bonuses in each episode.

We talk about our podcast a lot – and there is much to discuss!

Yes we are doing these partly because we are having fun. I’d challenge you to talk about books you read with interesting people, or ways to think about library success, without having fun.

But our mission as a multitype library system is twofold: Advocacy and Education.

We hope our podcasts achieve both of these goals!

Right now our podcast Linking Our Libraries is up. (Each of our two main podcast run 15 episode seasons, while the other one is on hiatus.)

We are into Season Four. And again this season we are working our way through a collection of leadership/management competencies. These are knowledge, skills, and abilities that anyone working in a library can use.

Each week we talk about a different competency. We provide information you can use to learn more about it, and our Guest Hosts come talk about using the competency in practice.

How can you use this in your own training? How can your library share this information across the staff, or across others in your school or organization?

SO GLAD YOU ASKED!

• Subscribe to Linking Our Libraries in your favorite podcast app
  • If you see an icon with Official Office Bear Orville – that’s our old link. Unsubscribe to that; we’ve moved up in the world and are all kinds of nifty now!
  • Type or copy this RSS feed into any podcast app: http://linkingourlibraries.libsyn.com/rss
  • You should see the blue, graphic icon that you also see a couple of paragraphs above this very sentence.
• Stream it on our website
  • Just click here
  • You can see all the episodes on this page
  • Each individual episode has a show notes page. You can stream it right there, and read all the show information
• Read useful information
  • On each show notes page we have the basics of the material we discussed, so you can find it all in one place
  • This is especially helpful when we talk about content in big lists, or have a lot of topics to share

We want this podcast to be a true learning experience for you, and for your colleagues. We will provide a quiz after each episode, to give you a chance to demonstrate and apply the knowledge you learned on the topic. This will help you to cement your understanding of the competency, and give you some ways to apply it in your work life.

School library people, teachers, and anyone else who needs to accumulate continuing education credits: We will provide you with a certificate attesting to your meeting Minnesota state standards for your continuing education requirements. We anticipate working through each podcast episode, and the accompanying material will provide .5 hour of credit.

If you are licensed outside Minnesota, talk to us! We will work to create a system that will work for your state’s requirements.

Stay tuned for this new program!

If you would like to be contacted when we begin this program, add your name and email below. We will have this information in our weekly newsletter, and we will send you a special invitation!

We are very interested in helping all our members (and other library people!) get the training they need to be ready to serve their communities. Working in libraries means constant change, new services coming along all the time. Staying on top of it all is tough! Stay tuned here each week for some ideas you can use to dazzle your library with skills!

This week let’s look at weeding.

Yes, weeding can be scary. You never want to give people the idea that you are just randomly flinging books into the trash. Eeek! There is no easier way to ensure you lose funding, respect, and maybe your job.

Fortunately, none of that is necessary!

Let’s think about weeding as it should be: a necessary and useful tool to keep your collection tidy and up to date.

First: Have A Policy

I can’t stress this enough. Have a policy written down, and follow it. Hopefully you were able to work with a team to share ideas as you created that policy. (Members: call CMLE to chat about your policy!)

You can get policy ideas, and a lot of other information about weeding from the classic manual for libraries: CREW A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries.

Second: Decide on Your Criteria

You are not usually going to weed the entire library at once. Pick a section, or go to your assigned section, and look it over. Anything look horrid right away? Are there lots of holes?

Run a report to see how long books have been on the shelf without moving. (Your ILS should do this; give the vendor a call if you are not sure how to make that happen.) One thing you will find is that a bunch of books are missing. Yay! Well, it’s good news at least that those books can either just be deleted or reordered to keep sharing with people.

Then look at the standard stuff:

M = Misleading–factually inaccurate
U = Ugly–worn beyond mending or rebinding
 S =  Superceded–by a new edition of by a much better book on the subject
T = Trivial–of no discernible literary or scientific merit
I  =  Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the library’s community
E =  Elsewhere–the material is easily obtainable from another library

Third: Make It Happen

All of these books need to LEAVE YOUR LIBRARY!

Don’t worry if your shelves look too empty. (Well, okay, sure, worry; but that’s a different topic.) Junk on the shelves is still junk, and it’s not helping you serve your community.

FLING THIS STUFF IN THE TRASH AND NEVER LOOK BACK!

If getting rid of books is hard for you, call us and we will come over and help you. If your administration, or other stakeholders, are getting twitchy about “all that wasted money” call us and we will come over to talk about the value of weeding!

Fourth (and Final): Bask In Your Success!

Congratulations!!!

Now the lovely flowers, fruits, and veggies of your collection can bloom without all those pesky weeds dragging them down! (Okay, that got a little tangled, but you see where I’m going with it.)

A few things should happen now:

• you feel professional pride
• your collection looks better to visitors
• your circ numbers go up because books are actually on the shelves, and patrons can easily find the good stuff

At this point, you may want to start working on the other end of collection development: bringing in new stuff. It’s beyond us today, but be sure your collection is a living thing: it grows and changes to meet the evolving needs of the community.

Now go! Weed one thing that needs to go! Take a picture if you dare, and tell us all about it!!