The LILRC Resource Sharing and Management Committee invites you to join us for its third annual Technical Services Open Forum.  These Open Forums strive to provide a place for those working in the Technical Services field to come together, hear about initiatives others are working on, and pose questions to be answered by the collective wisdom of the entire group.  Please email your questions in advance to minliu@lilrc.org.  This year’s program will feature presentations on weeding.

Presentations:

You Too Can Deselect In the Humanities and Social Sciences!
Victor T. Oliva, Professor and Coordinator of Reference Services, Adelphi University Libraries

Deselection of print copies of monographs in the humanities and social sciences should be an essential component of collection development.  Unfortunately, many librarians find this responsibility too time consuming and overwhelming to undertake.  Based upon my own research and experience in the deselection of older print titles in the humanities and social sciences at Adelphi University Libraries, I believe that considerable success can be achieved in this endeavor.  I used a systematic approach to review titles in these areas that were published more than fifty years ago.  In some cases I was also able to replace them with e-books.  Academic, public and specialized libraries can apply the protocols that I followed, with some modifications, to identify and review older print copies of books in their collections.  Then they too can deselect most of these titles and replace some of them with e-books.

Help—we’ve got to weed: Using SustainableCollections.com (GreenGlass)
Georgina (Gina) Martorella,  M.L.S., M.B.A., Associate Professor of Library Services, Hofstra University, Axinn Library

We, librarians, are by nature, reluctant to weed.  Many of us entered this profession because of our love of books and of course, libraries.  We believe in libraries as cultural institutions that preserve the past and make recorded knowledge readily available. Practical considerations, however, require that we evaluate and deselect materials that are no longer relevant or useful to our patrons.  Although weeding should be done periodically, often more immediate space concerns demand that larger-scale weeding projects take place in a short period of time.  This presentation will discuss one academic library’s weeding project in particular, and describe how OCLC’s Sustainable Collections Green Glass tool was utilized to provide the information necessary to make informed deselection decisions in order to preserve and improve the value, integrity, and usefulness of the collection.