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This paper will provide an adaptable roadmap for weeding a monograph collection at a small academic library. When starting straight out of library school as the first Collection Development Librarian for the St. Edward’s University library in July 2010, I was confronted with a monograph collection that had never been weeded in any systematic way. As a small liberal arts university library, it is not our mission to collect comprehensively but rather to support the current curriculum, which is focused on social issues in a global context. Yet, there we were with a dusty, dated, unused collection filling the shelves. The original goals of the weeding project were to remove outdated and unused materials from the collection and to discover areas where materials should be replaced or built upon. As will be discussed, a new more pressing goal presented itself during the course of this project. I will outline the process I went through to develop criteria for weeding the collection and how these criteria were adapted to different subject areas based on the curriculum of a given department. I will highlight the tools I used to generate lists of items to be weeded after the criteria were set and how to keep track of progress using SpringShare LibGuides. Lastly, I will cover the most unanticipated challenge in managing this project: the human element, in the form of both faculty and librarian colleagues reluctant to weed. The project is ongoing with the goal of having an entire collection review completed by May 2012. Introduction St. Edward’s University is a small, Catholic liberal arts school that has grown in size and ambition over the last 10 years without the campus library exactly matching or reflecting this growth. The curriculum had been completely overhauled to focus on current social issues and globalization and library research within these areas. Other disciplines’ information needs had either migrated online or shifted away from monographs entirely. The library collection, while weeded piecemeal over the years, had never been reviewed systematically to reflect these new developments in the curriculum. This was partially because no collection development policy existed to dictate criteria for weeding and partially because prior to the creation of my position there had been no collection development librarian project managing and pushing typically back-burner collection maintenance to the forefront. The original goal of this project was to create a more relevant, highly used print collection, but then we were thrown the happy, though stressful curveball of a donation to renovate the library. In the new learning commons space there will be approximately half the space that we currently have for the print collection so this project has taken on a greater sense of urgency recently. We would not be provided any off-site storage for the rest of the collection and have had to decide what we could remove from the collection entirely. We are still on target for a May 2012 completion of the collection review, which is when it will all be packed up and moved into storage during the renovation. The Policy The first step in the process was developing a policy that could stand up to questions and concerns from both librarian colleagues and campus faculty. I looked at policies from many other comparable libraries for an indication of what were reasonable criteria both for selection and de-selection of materials. Especially useful were the policies from the Wilson W. Clark Memorial Library at the University of Portland, the MacPhaidin Library at Stonehill College and the Dewitt Wallace Library at Macalester College. All of these schools are teaching institutions that do not keep materials in perpetuity, but rather support the current curriculum taught by the faculty. St. Edward’s is also a teaching institution of just over 5,000 students and the policy reflects this by focusing on the importance of supporting the curriculum. In addition to supporting the current social issues and globalization curriculum, the library also had to meet the needs of robust religious studies and philosophy departments and masters programs in business, counseling, and liberal arts.

A First-Year Librarian’s Weeding Project Management Experience from Start to (Planned) Finish