I'm just kidding. Or am I? It depends on whether or not you think librarian work is interesting in any way whatsoever.
I've been working on a number of things this week, but this morning was fairly quiet, so I took the opportunity to do some weeding. We need to clear out some space in the collection in general, and it's a great opportunity to trim the fat of old, unnecessary or unused books in order to make way for new and more useful ones! But this time, I brought along a camera.
You get to come along and see a little bit of what we do! Revealing photos and all. I just wish National Geographic saw us for the feral entities we are; taking pictures and weeding, like walking and chewing gum, are not two activities that go together well. Still, the truth must be told!
Here's the basic equipment I use (click to enlarge):
Book cart, laptop with our circulation system up and running, barcode scanner. Obscured in this photo: The most recent issue of American Libraries I'm using to cushion the laptop on the metal cart!
A lot of times, when you're combing the collection, you'll usually find an oddity or two:
Not a bad idea, right? But there are a number of issues with this book. First, it's fairly out of context with the section it's in; we're looking at the study of linguistics, after all. However, it's multilingual and kind of weird, so it ended up in 413, which is for specialized and/or polyglot dictionaries -- of which we don't actually have many. Most of our foreign-language dictionaries are for specific languages and are fairly pedestrian, so end up higher in the 400s. Another issue is just that it's old. There are no drawings of computers, for instance, but there are plenty for things that simply don't exist anymore.
Plus the fact that the spine has been taped up -- can't miss the tape, it takes up a good portion of the cover -- indicates that it's not in the greatest of conditions. Still another problem is that it's relatively limited in terms of actual translation ability. If you're relying on the pictures, for instance, how do you convey that you're looking for a library if there's no textual translation of a "LIBRARY" sign on a drawing of a building? How do you get around that without making someone think you're looking for a decent bookcase? Or a policeman, who may be wearing a different uniform from the one depicted? And what really bothers me is the picture in the lower right-hand corner. What is that?
Let's look inside.
Hmm. This is interesting and might actually be pretty useful. Then you hit the watering-can thing in the bottom-middle row on the right-hand page. Why does one need to water one's flowers when one is traveling in a foreign country? Or is it a coffee pot of some kind? What's that thing floating in midair next to it? Or the upper right-hand corner -- is it true that American tourists were once in the habit of accosting strangers for their keys? Or the drawing of the parking lot just below that one; the symbol "P" doesn't necessarily denote "parking" in every language.
This leads to another limitation: more than the fact that only four European languages are represented here, a good deal of these drawings display a Western bias. I have to wonder if, say, a rural Cambodian knows what a garage is.
Either way, it's taking up space in the collection. Don't worry, we didn't spend a lot of money on it:
It's a donation. Historically, the Gallaudet University Library has been lucky enough to benefit from the largess of University students, staff, faculty, and alumni, as well as local community figures, and continues to do so; because of this, a pretty significant portion of the collection has come from private libraries over the decades. Although this particular case does not mean, in any way, that we're less attached to donated books than ones we purchase, it does mean that our collection is full of truly random things that may not have been added to the collection with strict utility in mind.
But all of this is really just my own evaluation of the book as a librarian. Let's see if it's backed up by our circulation records:
Lasers from space! And on the laptop, we see ...
This is the dirt: the history of the item since the record was entered into our system, which was August 2, 1997. No last transaction listed, which means this book was last checked out at some point before 1997. Actually probably long before 1997; when we switched over to electronic, every effort was made to enter information about the book's history before then, so if there was a card in the back of the book with stamps indicating that it had been checked out, that information would probably have made it into this window (and no, we don't keep any more information than that; we don't keep data on who borrowed what, just on whether or not the book was borrowed at all). There's been zero activity on this book in at least 14 years. Toss!
It's not easy to find books like the picture dictionary, though, that are so clearly out of step with the collection and which haven't been used at all since we began keeping electronic records. Some books that we weed have been used, but not enough to justify their place within the collection, and especially considering how misleading they can be sometimes. For instance, take a look at this one:
Current approaches! Pretty nice; it's always useful to get up-to-date information on the state of the field. But then you look at the call number label:
Sure was nice of a former staffer to point out the important information. This book is three decades out of date! I can see why it's still here in the collection, though; it probably provides a useful look at the state of phonological theory as of 1979, which might be good for historical research. However, one important aspect of weeding is knowledge and understanding of the academic departments involved and the ability to keep their needs in mind. And not a whole lot of research into the history of linguistics itself goes on here; we do have much more recent historical overviews that include this date, as well as the perspective that comes with hindsight. Toss!
I'm not going to take pictures of each and every book I took, so we'll skip right to the end:
I have to admit to feeling a certain kind of thrill when I see a large set of books that are clearly outdated, irrelevant, and unused, like -- and I'm male, so forgive my color sense -- the mauve-ish set of books in the middle of the second shelf from the top. Toss!
In any case, the process you've seen here gets repeated anywhere from 75 to 150 times per cart, depending on the size of each book. With that in mind, it may not surprise you that some books have been on our shelves for a very long time -- some for a century or so -- and with a collection as large as ours, it can take a long time to get through with weeding.
Long enough, in fact, that by the time we've finished weeding, we've added enough new books in the meantime to require that we start over again as soon as we're done!
It's moments like this that I realize that our collection -- library collections in general, all over the world -- are dynamic, living things. They grow, shrink, and change according to the nature of the times and the people who manage them. In times like these, I wish we had a book: The Care and Feeding of Library Collections.
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This was enjoyable to read, thank you. I spend a lot of time in libraries, but my range of activities is pretty limited. I always appreciate learning more about what goes into making them the comfortable spaces that they are. Thank you for sharing.
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