The topic of weeding materials in a library came up recently, but it posed more problems than solutions. Weeding must be done to keep the materials in your library current, useful, and accurate. However, how one goes about weeding is by making very difficult decisions that not everyone is garunteed to agree with or support.
What do you do with an old almanac that has outdated and inaccurate information but is beloved by your patrons? If you decide to get rid of it, do you then sell it to someone who cherished it or destroy it so no one can claim you gave out "bad information?" With fiction you don't have the problem of outdated information, but there may be books with predjudicial words because of the times they were written in. Do you trash those or keep them and hope they are taken in context by your patrons?
All of the kinds of decisions above are made in an effort to let a collection grow into the most relevent, useful, and inspiring it can be. Like weeding gardens to let the best plants grow, libraries must remove select materials to let the really brilliant books shine in their collections.
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