Once again, I’m packing up and moving everything I own.  A few days ago, I was standing in my house looking around at stacks of boxes and things still to be packed and I realized that it’s time again to let go of accumulated stuff again. It seems no matter how often I move and clear things out and pare down (I’ve moved four times in five years), there’s still more to clear out when I move.

And it got me thinking about our libraries and how we in libraries so often hold on to things for far too long. And that’s unfortunate – no one really benefits from what’s no longer needed or useful or current.

So today, I’m going to talk about three areas that all librarians need to examine with an eye to letting go of the old and making room for the new. We can benefit when we make it a regular practice to weed out, declutter, let go, and refresh. 

You can find the show notes at masterfullibrarian.com/ep-19.

Weeding Your Collection

Are your shelves stuffed to the maximum and filled with books or videos from 20 or more years ago?  If they are, it’s time to do a serious weeding.

This is a necessary activity that we all know we need to do but may often put off because it’s time-consuming and somewhat laborious. Weeding was never my favorite activity.

There may also be institutional or community obstructions to removing materials – like a principal who thinks you shouldn’t remove anything regardless of how old or inaccurate, or community members who object to weeding out racially offensive materials.  

Even so, you should pursue ways to remove outdated, incorrect, damaged, and patently offensive materials from your library. 

Mounds of anecdotal evidence show that having bookshelves that are only about ½ to ¾’s full makes browsing materials easier and will actually increase circulation – at least for a period of time. This is especially true for younger children. A packed bookshelf makes looking at individual books difficult for small hands.

Hopefully, you have a documented policy and procedure in place that guides weeding of materials from your library.  If you don’t, I suggest you explore that as a possibility.  It’s always good to have an approved policy and procedure manual to support your actions in the library. But that’s a topic for another episode.

If there is no policy and you’re getting pushback from anyone about removing materials, then consider going guerilla.  Remove items one or two at a time and discard them somewhere away from the library.

I’ve had so many books picked up out of trash cans by well-meaning custodians and returned to my desk, even though they were marked “Discard” all over them!

Just be sure to follow any state or local laws and regulations addressing the discarding of items purchased with state monies of with taxpayer funds. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of the law about that. 

Decluttering Your Space

When you look around your library, what do you see?  Are your displays and posters so old you forgot when you put them up? Or maybe you didn’t even put them up, they were put up by your predecessor.  Have you got 75 stuffed animals that so many children have handled that their ears have frayed and their eyes have fallen off or they’re just dirty? Do you have artwork that is dull, age-inappropriate, or maybe even faded from years of hanging on the wall?  

Trust me, if you have pictures of former principals in a high school library or worn and possibly germ-ridden plushies in your space, you need to do some updating.

If you have these things, it’s time for a major decluttering and refreshing of your physical space. 

For complete show notes, please visit masterfullibrarian.com/ep-19.