No, not the garden (not in this weather!), but the staff's collection of professional books. We moved it to a new location near my office, and I kept staring at it thinking I really needed to see if it needed updating. The holidays are a good time for this kind of project because it isn't so busy, so I dug in.
How do we choose what to keep & what to get rid of? What I've done for this collection is pretty much what we do for everything.
First I look at how much they're used. There are some I dig into all the time, so those are keepers. Others are standard reference works for Technical Services, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) books, and we definitely need a copy of that!
Next, I check the copyright dates. Some of the books are pretty old - but that's a relative term, depending upon what you're talking about. A book on searching techniques for the internet is old if it's from more than a year ago because too much of the information is now wrong, wrong, wrong, where the book about assigning call numbers to music recordings is still good, though it's from the 70s. So you decide what's too old based on the content and what will do for a bit longer.
Then Shawnee (she's back - YAY!) checked to see if there were newer editions available of the books I said were too old. We started our wish list with these.
For a couple of the books, though, I decided to just keep the older edition rather than buying the new one. After all, our funds are limited, and books on storytimes for two-year-olds (at $40 for a new edition) still have tons of good ideas in them, even if they're from 5 years ago. (Mary reviewed the children's services books for me - always ask an expert when you can!) We can get fingerplays and related activities for newer books on the web. We're not going to update the DDC either, even though we're one edition behind. Since we don't run into that many weird classifying problems, we can wait either until I get more money ($375) or until the next edition comes out. Besides, the major changes are listed on OCLC, one of the professional websites we use, and we can always check the Library of Congress web catalog to see what they've done.
I'm taking out a couple more titles because they aren't relevant any more. I have a collections of essays on running a one-person-library which was useful back when I started and we saw about 3,000 people a month and worked with about 40 offices -- we've grown a lot since then (THANK YOU) -- and the techniques just aren't as helpful. This one I'll offer to other AF library directors, see if someone else can use it. Same with other books that might be useful to others, even if a bit old. As long as the information isn't actually incorrect.
Is all this boring? Well, not to me. See, every time I shape the collection like this, I'm thinking about you. What you want. What you need. What you don't yet know you want or need. I want the "right" stuff to be on the shelf when you come in - and it truly makes all of this detail-work worthwhile when I hear that someone came into the Library and found just what they wanted.
Currently Reading: "ANSCR: The Alpha-Numeric System for Classification of Recordings." I think I'll go back to the cat book.
Currently Listening to: "Mi Morena" by Josh Groban (vocal pop)
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