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Weeding (the process of removing books from a library collection) is and has always been a major part of maintaining a library. The library continually withdraws items from the collection, basing its decisions on a number of factors, including publishing date, frequency of circulation, community interest and availability of newer or more valid materials. Items dealing with local history are an exception, as are certain classics and award-winning children's books. Fiction that was once popular but no longer in demand and non-fiction books that are no longer useful are candidates for withdrawal from the collection. Many nonfiction books, such as encyclopedias, are now available digitally and are updated each year. That saves the library a lot of space.
When I look at the library's collection and where to weed, I consider the item's publication date, circulation history and the physical condition of the resource. There are areas of the collection that are important to the community (e.g. genealogy collections and local history collections), which may cause me to not evaluate a given section or not as strictly as other sections. I also consider whether an author is about to release a new title after a long hiatus, making it worth keeping the rest of their books on the shelves despite low usage statistics.
FYI – withdrawn books are donated to the Friends of the Library for book sales. The proceeds from such sales are used for the benefit of the library.
Book of the week!
If you are going to read one book, give this one a try...
Goodbye Girl (Jack Swyteck series book #18) by James Grippando
(Adult fiction: novel, suspense, legal thriller) ~ 352 pages
In a nutshell: A feud between a pop-singing phenom and her ex-husband pulls Florida lawyer Jack Swyteck into a whirlpool of murder, betrayal and modern-day piracy.
Music mogul Shaky Nichols has sued his ex, the single-named Imani, for defaming him by charging that he stole much of her back catalog when EML Records, the company he controls, simply bought the copyrights in secret. (He'd been about to present them to her as a surprise, Shaky claims, when she filed for divorce.) Even though Imani publicly accused Shaky of pirating her music and urged her zillions of fans to retaliate by pirating the recordings he owns, Jack, her lawyer, manages to get Shaky's suit dismissed without prejudice, but the trouble doesn't go away. Even worse, the trouble is linked to the corpse of Tyler McCormick, who was strangled and chained to a piling on Florida's Isola di Lolando 12 years ago.
The FBI presses Imani to meet privately with Russian oligarch Vladimir Kava, whose teenage granddaughter wants a private concert, so that she can wear a wire and record him acknowledging that he and his son, Sergei, are running a global digital piracy operation. When that meeting doesn't come off as planned, Jack finds himself back in court with his unreliable client, who's charged, like her ex, with that 12-year-old murder, each co-defendant eager to throw the other under the bus.
Meanwhile, Jack's agreement with his wife, FBI agent Andie Henning, that they won't discuss their jobs runs aground once again, and his former client and sometime investigator, Theo Knight's trip to London, suddenly casts him in the role of accessory to a kidnapping and puts him squarely in the Kavas' crosshairs.
Bottom line: Enough eye-popping plot developments for a miniseries, which may be exactly the idea.
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Vince Giordano has been the librarian and director of the Juniata County Library since 2015.