Weeding the library "garden"

Weeding. That is, taking books out of the collection. Small libraries, and especially school libraries, have almost as much obligation to cull their collections of out-of-date, seldom-used books as they do to add current, needed books to the collection. Don't get me wrong - we've got plenty of classics and, yes, wonderful old stuff on our shelves. But we're squished into a tiny space here and I'm forced to systematically remove if I ever want to add the new.

(Parenthetical aside: fortunately, a goodly portion of our castoffs find homes in either the Oak Street high density remote storage facility or the Bookstacks. So these items are not truly gone, they are merely Elsewhere).

Right now the weeding cycle has reached the fiction section, a particularly difficult area to reckon with. But really, does a library of our size need a 756-page volume of Irwin Shaw's short stories? Or those 1970s young adult novels with 1970s-looking teens on the cover? Or even a second copy of The Secret Garden?

Weeding is a very sensitive issue in libraries and it's often done in the dead of night, when no one is around to see librarians actually removing books. Even as we pull books for this project and put them on a cart, students come by and discover them anew. Much sturm and drang ensues when they find out what we are doing - "But you can't take that book out of the library!" I'm tempted to put the books on display with a sign that says Books on the Chopping Block, or some such. Those that don't get checked out would go, the others would stay. But then I'd have to stand behind my word and find the space.