I'm back to working on weeding the reference collection, and I feel stymied. There are so many books that just aren't the sort of thing anyone is going to borrow (most of them are so heavy you'd never get them home to start with) and I wonder about the sense in transferring them to the regular collection. They've never been even looked at while in reference (one of the reasons we want to weed Ref down to the barest of bare minimums).
Other books on the Reference shelves just seem to duplicate what is in the rest of the collection, particularly in the gardening and general "about animals" areas. We already have books on these topics - and we don't have the shelf space for more.
Does anyone use books of quotations anymore? Or the Who's Who? (I looked in it once but really only to see that Justice Michael Kirby's partner Johan really was listed.) And do we really need a Latin-English dictionary in a public library?
I'm tempted to change up my entire way of working on this task. Instead of looking at it as "weeding" the reference collection, I'm going to have a go at *building* what I think is a suitable reference collection, and then dealing with what's left.
Maquarie Dictionary and Thesaurus
Melway, Sydway, Gregorys and VicRoads
A couple of basic health books...
I think that's my task for the next two hour shift...
No comments:
Post a Comment