The University of NSW Library made the news yesterday after members of the law faculty found hundreds of bound volumes of international law journals discarded in an industrial bin.
This incident provides as good a reminder as any to:
* ensure your weeding and discard policies are up to date and ratified by your library advisory committee
* involve users in weeding decisions, and
* look at options for donating journals to third world libraries
1 comment:
Yes, weeding really is a no-win situation. If you have a sale of weeded material, invariably one of your patrons will try to convince you to keep the item(s) in the collection. If you consult your patrons about items earmarked for weeding they will argue passionately that they really need that book/journal. Not consulting is risky, but chances are they will never miss the item in question. You can't put weeded material in the recycling as it makes the bins too heavy. You can't take it to the tip - as the University of NSW experience shows.If you are lucky you might find a contact who can organise donation of the material to a developing country, but this provokes a crisis of conscience - 'Should we assume that material deemed too old for our collection is necessarily welcome elsewhere?'
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