Last Monday, I had the pleasure of speaking to the CLASS (Chicago Librarians Across Southern Suburbs) professional group. I spent the majority of my time answering questions from the group about weeding after giving my background on weeding and collection management.
- Weeded the entirety of my former library’s youth collection, much of which hadn’t been touched in quite a long time.
- Re-cataloged all picture books at my former library into subject categorization.
- Currently manage a picture book collection of 12,000-15,000 picture books & 6,000-8,000 beginning readers.
- Co-taught a workshop with my department head training all Kids & Teens paraprofessional staff members on weeding in 2014.
- Huge believer in constant weeding and daily collection management. Big advocate for weeding.
I prepared a presentation for the group, but didn’t have time to share it. The first slideshow is how the presentation would have looked that day:
And this second slideshow contains an outline of my notes and talking points integrated with the original slideshow.
I am putting this up to help and aide librarians in learning how to weed and to feel confident doing so. Please do not use my presentation as your own. Furthermore, all images in the presentation are either stock photos that I’ve purchased the rights to use, images I’ve taken myself, or screenshots from websites.
If you’d like to arrange for me to speak to your group either in-person or virtually, I’d be happy to discuss details via email [simplykatie[at]gmail[dot]com].
storytime katie 
Thank you so much for this! I’m in the middle of weeding my YA collection now, and while it hurts to weed a book that is brand new, the cold, hard fact is that it looks brand new because it’s sat on the shelf for 3+ years and not a single soul wants it.
I’m a huge fan of daily collection management, too. Thank you so much!
It’s so important to keep the weeding up — daily management helps that! And books that sit, lovely as they may be, just prevent easier browsing and accessibility to titles that patrons want!
Katie, thank you, thank you, thank you! I reference your blog weekly to get ideas for my preschool story time, so when I happened to see this weeding presentation, I got excited! (Yes, excited about weeding! LOL) I’m currently taking classes towards my MLIS and I needed a reference source on weeding for a project. Storytime Katie comes through again! I’m so glad I found your site!
Kate in San Diego
Thank you for reading! Glad that I decided to post it — I almost didn’t since it wasn’t storytime related!