Weeding

This is my first year as a media specialist and we have been doing our weeding periodically as we notice things that are outdated or in poor condition. Our county gives the schools extra funds to weed every four years and this isn't our year, but we have been weeding some things as we see fit. During the year that we have extra funds, much of the purchasing and weeding of our reference resources takes place. These are often pricey resources.

For example, as our students are working on annotated bibliographies this past week we noticed that the we have 5 copies of the old MLA Handbook and only 2 copies of the new edition. So, we took the old editions off the shelf and ordered a few more of the new editions.

On our last teacher work day we weeded a large number of old paperbacks that were yellowed, torn, and rarely checked out. We continually order new fiction books for our students, so this just involved cleaning off the shelves. We have a great fiction section that is updated monthly--if not weekly! There were a few of the old paperbacks that were "classics" so we just ordered newer copies of those titles to replace the old copies.