Blog of the Ohio Library Council Technical Services Division

Are your shelves getting full at your library?  Do your pages or shelvers have to constantly shift just to fit in the no longer ‘new’ materials into their regular section?  Have you weeded your collections in the past couple of years, or was it even longer? 

This is your reminder that your collection development policy should also have a part for deselection or weeding at its heart.  How can you keep your collection circulating if your materials are crammed on a shelf and not on display? 

If you have not ever weeded a section of materials before, this post will give you some key points to cover for your first weeding mission. 

The standard for many libraries for many years has been CREW (Continuous Review, Evaluation, and Weeding).  CREW: a Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries was last updated in 2012 and lived a long time on the Texas State Library and Archives Commission website, who had developed the method.  However, the climate for libraries in Texas recently has not been good for libraries of any kind, and sometime at the beginning of 2025, the guide was taken down from the webpage.  If you are interested in learning more about this, check out https://buttondown.com/wellsourced/archive/CREW-Method-Manual/ for more information. 

There are still ways to access the resource that were not linked to the Texas State Library webpage, so https://archive.org/details/crewmethod12 is a good place to start, and a simple browser search will bring up other PDF links through libguides and other sources. 

Rather than directly regurgitate the entire method here when you can easily read it for yourself, I am going to talk about how I weeded books (when I last weeded in 2022) at Tiffin-Seneca Public Library (T-SPL) when I was in Public Services. 

I was lucky over the course of my time at T-SPL that I was able to select for many different book sections.  When I came in, I began doing collection development for mysteries and parts of nonfiction books as well.  If you are just starting, like I was, it will take a while to get to know your sections, but weeding is an extremely helpful way of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your library’s collection.   

The very first step is to make sure that weeding is a part of your collection development policies.  If it is not, please look over page 25 of the CREW manual for more guidelines.  If you do not have the policies in place, patrons and other members of the public could see weeding as controversial.  Sometimes they do even when you do have policies. 

You need to gather your library’s statistics from the part of the collection you are going to weed.  At T-SPL, we used Sirsi Workflows and had access to BLUECloud Analytics.  As part of a consortium, there were already many permanent reports created, so we used the one for weeding.  If you can export to an Excel sheet or other spreadsheet, it is great to use the sorting features to mark up your report.  I highlighted the cells with less than 3 circs, last checkout 3 or more years ago, copyright date longer ago than the CREW guide recommends, and a different highlight color for books with more than 40 circs.  The last stat may tell you a book is very popular but has been out many times and needs to be replaced or repaired. 

There are three parts of the CREW formula —the copyright date I mentioned, the last time the book circulated, and negative factors which collectively are called MUSTIE.  The acronym stands for Misleading, Ugly, Superseded, Trivial, Irrelevant, or Elsewhere.  Using the report that’s been highlighted, I was also expected to give extra weight to core materials, found in the H. W. Wilson Core Collection books. You can see all the different titles they carry here:  https://www.hwwilsoninprint.com/core_collections.php.  I believe there may be electronic versions, though I have heard pricing is higher than the print. 

At the time, the Nonfiction Core Collection book was one volume probably around 2,000 pages, and while the book is helpfully in Dewey order, the choices of cookbook call numbers for our library and what the book used were often not the same, and I would look at the 641.5s multiple times as well as well as more specific ones for every title, which isn’t very efficient.  If you don’t have access to the books, do not worry about it.  Sometimes your vendor might have these listed on each book description page (I know Brodart did), and the books are also very expensive. 

It is not easy the first time weeding.  As I had never done deselection before, my supervisor looked through my picks.  I had too many books to be repaired, and since I was doing 600s in Dewey, the largest section of the nonfiction classes, it also took a long time with minimal off desk time.  I had to work on it while serving the public, so it could be frustrating.  I think my entire first section of weeding took at least three months, with off desk time used for other tasks that needed to be out of view.   

My supervisor tended to give more time to a book; later in my weeding I was more liberal because of space issues.  At one point, we got rid of a particular publisher’s set of Agatha Christie books that were bound in a brown leather (or leather like) material, and slowly replaced her books with trade paperbacks, filling the most popular books first.  Replacing or repairing books that are good circulators is another aspect of weeding. 

The CREW guide further discusses how to dispose of weeded materials and other steps in the CREW process.  Often, if a library has space and a Friends group, they will go to a Friends of the library book sale.  Some may need to be thrown away because of conditions or misleading information. 

The important thing to remember is that weeding is not only a science, but also an art. There is no exact formula to say when to take something off the shelf.  If you are unsure about an item, then a second opinion is always a great idea or consider leaving it in the collection for one more year to see if it may go out with some help from a display.  And you can be ruthless.  Do not be afraid to weed authors you love, because if they are not circulating in your community, it does not help to keep them on the shelf or order more.  I know this has presented lots of information as well as one librarian’s perspective in a single library, but every perspective can help you in your own job deselecting.    

I know this has been a long post, thanks to those who were able to read through it all.  Feel free to comment with any questions you might have below.