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Librarian Interview: Small Town Library

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My interview was with Librarian A, a librarian in a very small town. They do not have an official collections policy-online or in person, so I thought it would be interesting to interview a librarian in such a unique position would be interesting. For full disclosure, I have volunteered at the library before and assisted with weeding in their library. This interview was conducted over the phone, as the library itself is located three hours away from where I live currently. I chose Librarian A to speak to due to the unique library that she runs. She is the librarian for a town of about 600 people. The library itself is just a singular room in an already small building that has the courthouse, police station, and DVM, truly a one-stop shop.
Once on the phone we chatted about the town and the new things that were happening, a coffee shop had just opened up- the first new business in town in a few years, and there was a new pastor for one of the four churches. Once we got down to business she told me about the weeding process for the library. "We focus on weeding out books that aren't checked out very often, or that are starting to fall apart." Currently, they're working on weeding the books they have in storage, a small closet under the stairs. "We found a chemistry textbook from 1910 the other day." She tells me, it was still in good condition, and had notes and doodles in the margins from the previous owner. "It's not something we're going to keep," she explained. "But we didn't want to throw it away since it was so interesting." They were able to contact the historical society (Librarian A and the leader of the historical society are actually neighbors) and they were happy to take it off of their hands. "A lot of our weeding is based on personal judgment." She told me. "It's a slow going process though since it's just me now." She'll get volunteers from time to time to help it along, but most of the time it's her own project. Overall it seems like her weeding project follows the lines of most others- just to a smaller scale and with small town twang.
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