Annotated Article Bibliography - Developing and Implementing a Disapproval Plan: One University Library’s Experience
Way, D., & Garrison, J. (2013). Developing and Implementing a Disapproval Plan: One University
Library’s Experience. College & Research Libraries News, 74(6), 284-287.
doi:10.5860/crln.74.6.8958
Weeding is a task often left undone for many reasons. Among them are time, a lack of codified rules, and the emotions involved with the general anxiety that comes from having to ‘get rid of’ books and other library materials. Michigan’s Grand Valley State University set out to develop a weeding regimen to facilitate the task.
Summary
In 2013, Grand Valley State University libraries were comprised of a main library, three branches, and an off-site storage facility. During that year a new library was opened, which required all of the materials in the offsite facility to be moved to a new Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS). Due to previous difficulties weeding such a system, and the potential expense of moving many low usage monographs to the new facility, the library decided to begin a weeding project. A 2007 weeding had been time consuming and only resulted in the withdrawal of 8,000 items.
The library aimed to develop a plan that would be more efficient and productive than the previous weeding effort. They also wanted a plan that added weeding to liaison librarian’s workflow rather than make it a large-scale task to be done every so often. In 2009, the university began working with Sustainable Collections Services (SCS) on a large-scale deselection project. SCS is a company with the goals of using tools to make weeding, data-driven, rules-based, accurate and efficient.
Liaison librarians received information about the project and concept and their input was solicited. They were in favor of rules-based deselection and identified criteria used in past projects. Their criteria were: age, use, circulation, reviews, existence on standard lists, other owning libraries, author, publisher, series, book type and citations. SCS ran the library’s holdings versus several databases. After review, the libraries received a collection summary. Candidates for withdrawal were books published before 2000 and that had not circulated since 1998, held by over 100 libraries nationwide, not currently in the Resources for College Libraries (RCL).
There were three methods to determine whether a candidate should be withdrawn. 1) materials from the list were reviewed to determine retention, 2) materials were pulled so that the liasons could review the item in person, 3) staging the items in the stacks so that they could be seen in the context of the rest of the collection. Using these three methods, liaison librarians were instructed that they would have to justify any material they kept from the generated list rather than the conventional method of justifying items being discarded. In this case, the liaisons had to look for a compelling reason to retain the material with all of the qualitative information against it. Doing so increased the yield and reduced librarian anxiety.
Using the parameters set by SCS, just over 86% of candidates identified by the system were ultimately withdrawn. Of the retained items, humanities kept more books than any other discipline. Conversely, in the science areas, 96% of their candidates were withdrawn. The project took staff ‘a few summer months.’ Between June and August of 2011, student employees worked with one full time staff member to stage and tag books for librarian review. Students also worked in the storage facility and removed nearly 9,000 titles that did not require on site review.
The library considered this project to be a huge success.The librarians were astonished at how quickly the process moved, how well criteria identified removal candidates, and the volume of withdrawal. The following year the main branch conducted a smaller, equally successful project. In the future, the library intends on implementing a ‘disapproval plan’ to generate smaller lists based on the previously identified criteria. This will allow for weeding to be done in small continuous bursts rather than resource consuming large scale projects. GSVU plans on partnering with other libraries in Michigan for a shared print management project. The Michigan Shared Print Initiative is a distribution project for the sharing of print monographs. Two libraries agreed to hold the low-use monographs to allow other libraries to withdraw those items. While weeding will never be popular, data and collaborative partnerships allows Michigan university libraries to do so without it being an anxiety creating burden.
Library’s Experience. College & Research Libraries News, 74(6), 284-287.
doi:10.5860/crln.74.6.8958
Weeding is a task often left undone for many reasons. Among them are time, a lack of codified rules, and the emotions involved with the general anxiety that comes from having to ‘get rid of’ books and other library materials. Michigan’s Grand Valley State University set out to develop a weeding regimen to facilitate the task.
Summary
In 2013, Grand Valley State University libraries were comprised of a main library, three branches, and an off-site storage facility. During that year a new library was opened, which required all of the materials in the offsite facility to be moved to a new Automated Storage and Retrieval System (ASRS). Due to previous difficulties weeding such a system, and the potential expense of moving many low usage monographs to the new facility, the library decided to begin a weeding project. A 2007 weeding had been time consuming and only resulted in the withdrawal of 8,000 items.
The library aimed to develop a plan that would be more efficient and productive than the previous weeding effort. They also wanted a plan that added weeding to liaison librarian’s workflow rather than make it a large-scale task to be done every so often. In 2009, the university began working with Sustainable Collections Services (SCS) on a large-scale deselection project. SCS is a company with the goals of using tools to make weeding, data-driven, rules-based, accurate and efficient.
Liaison librarians received information about the project and concept and their input was solicited. They were in favor of rules-based deselection and identified criteria used in past projects. Their criteria were: age, use, circulation, reviews, existence on standard lists, other owning libraries, author, publisher, series, book type and citations. SCS ran the library’s holdings versus several databases. After review, the libraries received a collection summary. Candidates for withdrawal were books published before 2000 and that had not circulated since 1998, held by over 100 libraries nationwide, not currently in the Resources for College Libraries (RCL).
There were three methods to determine whether a candidate should be withdrawn. 1) materials from the list were reviewed to determine retention, 2) materials were pulled so that the liasons could review the item in person, 3) staging the items in the stacks so that they could be seen in the context of the rest of the collection. Using these three methods, liaison librarians were instructed that they would have to justify any material they kept from the generated list rather than the conventional method of justifying items being discarded. In this case, the liaisons had to look for a compelling reason to retain the material with all of the qualitative information against it. Doing so increased the yield and reduced librarian anxiety.
Using the parameters set by SCS, just over 86% of candidates identified by the system were ultimately withdrawn. Of the retained items, humanities kept more books than any other discipline. Conversely, in the science areas, 96% of their candidates were withdrawn. The project took staff ‘a few summer months.’ Between June and August of 2011, student employees worked with one full time staff member to stage and tag books for librarian review. Students also worked in the storage facility and removed nearly 9,000 titles that did not require on site review.
The library considered this project to be a huge success.The librarians were astonished at how quickly the process moved, how well criteria identified removal candidates, and the volume of withdrawal. The following year the main branch conducted a smaller, equally successful project. In the future, the library intends on implementing a ‘disapproval plan’ to generate smaller lists based on the previously identified criteria. This will allow for weeding to be done in small continuous bursts rather than resource consuming large scale projects. GSVU plans on partnering with other libraries in Michigan for a shared print management project. The Michigan Shared Print Initiative is a distribution project for the sharing of print monographs. Two libraries agreed to hold the low-use monographs to allow other libraries to withdraw those items. While weeding will never be popular, data and collaborative partnerships allows Michigan university libraries to do so without it being an anxiety creating burden.
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