I’ve been weeding a lot this year. I’m usually a gradual weeder. I take a section of the collection each year and go through it with a fine tooth comb looking for items that are missing pages, moldy, defaced, or severely out of date. How often do I find moldy items? I work in a middle school library. This age is really hard on books. Probably harder than any group I’ve worked with except for toddlers. The students put everything in their book bags – open Capri Sun pouches, mud covered gym sneakers – everything.

But this year is different. I decided to go through the non fiction collection and pull out anything that is severely out of date. Now that we have ready access to regularly updated information in our online subscriptions, I find that my definition of severely out of date is changing. Has this happened to you? We still have our opening day collection of country information books (their copyright ranges from 1992 to 1999.) Before we had a subscription to Culture Grams online and a computer for every student, they were indispensable. Now they just collect dust. I find the same to be true of almost everything that was purchased for the opening collection that was intended for ‘report writing’ type of research. The information we have available online, whether through a paid of free resource, is updated regularly and much more appealing to my students. I know that without these books cluttering up our shelves, my students will have an easier time finding reading materials they really want. But the shelves will be so empty! Of course, that might have something to do with 8+ years of woefully inadequate budgets…

Anyway, here is a picture of my weeding carts, just for inspiration (if you, like me, need to take a serious look at your collection.)

And, because I can’t resist, here is my favorite from weeding so far: