Justifying and Advocating for Weeding Your Collection

Abstract

Many of us want to weed our collections of old, damaged, or simply bad books and media. Or better, to not accept such materials as donations to start with! But we often come up against opposition to “throwing away perfectly good books!” from both our users and the community at large. There are many strategies we can use to both justify discarding unwanted and unusable materials, and to gently turn away donations of such items when given. We’ll examine ways to change hearts and minds about the value of weeding.