W. Lee Hisle (slides)Many academic libraries face the challenge of decreasing the size of print collections. This 2-part presentation offers perspectives on a range of activities for successful projects. Connecticut College will share the background and principles that guided its recent project, including the importance of administrative support, marketing of the project to the faculty, the role of data in that effort, the lessons learned from other institutions, and the key documents and tools developed to encourage faculty support of the project. In addition, assessment markers to judge progress and the importance of consultant assistance will be discussed. Wesleyan University will compare the key differences in their project’s objectives, principles and challenges with those of Connecticut College, and summarize the lessons drawn from their experience.
The second part of the presentation will focus on organizational challenges and workflow changes in Technical Services as libraries engage in large and collaborative weeding and retention projects. Libraries at nine state-supported Michigan universities are working collaboratively to identify and manage a shared collection of widely held low-use monograph titles. The Michigan Shared Print Initiative (MI-SPI) distributes retention responsibility for each title to two libraries in the group, allowing others to choose to remove them. Ferris State University will share details about a comprehensive weeding project that included applying additional rules to the weeding lists, documenting decisions to keep titles, and developing processes and workflows. Central Michigan University will share new workflows that take into account retention responsibilities and discuss the development of a tool that facilitates communication among participating libraries about volumes that are missing or in poor condition. This broadly focused session will help attendees gain valuable insights about how to best carry out weeding and retention projects.
