Weeding by Committee: Involving Faculty in the Deselection Process

Abstract

Weeding is often an emotionally charged topic for both librarians and faculty. However, a print collection needs weeding in order to be stronger and more relevant. Despite the merits of deselection, the prospect of discarding books often makes the campus community nervous, concerned, and defensive. At California State University, Fullerton’s (CSUF) Pollak Library, librarians were preparing for a large-scale monograph weeding project. The library faculty and administration grappled with how to productively and efficiently involve the large CSUF teaching faculty in the weeding process, knowing that many in the campus community were very concerned about the project. Staff from the library systems department were tasked with developing an innovative web-based tool that would enable faculty to easily provide feedback on deselection candidates on a title-by-title basis. The initial pilot, in which 1700 titles slated for deselection were loaded into the interface for faculty feedback, resulted in faculty requesting that nearly every title be retained in the collection. A second load of over 30,000 titles had very different results. This paper discusses CSUF’s weeding process, the creation of the deselection tool, and the design of the user interface. It also analyzes the results of faculty feedback entered via the weeding interface, comparing results from the initial pilot to the larger, ongoing project.