 Good morning and welcome to Encompass Live. I'm Emily Nimsikant here at the Nebraska Library Commission filling in for your regular host, Christa Burns. Encompass Live is the Nebraska Library Commission's weekly online event. It covers NLC activities and other library related topics. Our presentations are done by either NLC staff or guest presenters. The one-hour sessions are free and they take place every Wednesday morning from at 10 a.m. central time and they include a wide variety of content including presentations, interviews, book reviews, web tours, mini-training sessions, and Q&A sessions. Today we do have NLC staff with us, the Commission's own Laura Johnson, who is going to talk to us about weeding. Take it away Laura. Hi. Thanks Emily. Okay today I thought we'd talk about weeding. This is an on-core presentation of this particular thing. We did this at NLA. So we're going to talk about weeding. Why is it so difficult and what can we do about it? So let's go get started. Oops that wasn't... why won't it advance the slides for me? Okay and here's we first have 10 reasons to weed. Do we need to press enter? Just a second. We're having a little... okay well you can save time inventorying. If you have fewer books you need to eliminate the items that no longer fit your library's mission. You reduce duplicate copies. You increase use of other materials. You save space. You eliminate items no longer of interest to patrons. You encourage browsing. You protect readers from inaccurate information. This is a biggie. That's the great sin in libraries is to have misinformation. So you want to be sure that you do get books out that are inaccurate. You save patrons and staff's time. Remember our Ranganathan's five laws? That's one of them. Save the time of the patron. And you increase the library's appeal. So there's lots of good reasons why we want to weed. The rule of thumb? About 3% a year is what we aim at. That's what's required for Nebraska Public Library accreditation. And that is what generally seems across the board to be about what we look for. When we look at what Nebraska libraries do weed, I took the 2009 Nebraska Public Library Statistics. I put the libraries in categories by the size of the population they served. So for instance, libraries that serve between 100 and 499 people averaged 5% of their book collection withdrawn in 2009. So you see that most people aren't having any trouble meeting a 3%, but you know, these are averages. And what is 3% of the average collection? Well, again, for our population category of 100 to 499 people served, the average, and this is just a mean, was 7,472 books. So about 7,500 books. And 3% of that is 224 books. So that's actually kind of doable. And you see that as the population categories get, the population that served get larger, the number of books in the collection get larger, and then of course the percentage is larger. So what are the reasons that weaning doesn't get done? We all admit that we need to weed. We all admit that we want to weed. So why doesn't it happen? Well, I think there's a few reasons. First one, we're librarians. We love the books. And we think there's no such thing as a bad book. Well, you know, maybe there is. And it's time to get them out of the collection. The wrong book, the wrong something is not better than nothing. An out of date book that's going to give people misinformation is worse than not having information at all on the subject. And remember, any more, it's never a matter of not having information. There's information on the internet about almost anything. So we need to be very selective about the books we have. Librarians do have a responsibility for getting rid of books because people think that if they're on the library shelf, the library is saying, hey, here's a good book. So you don't want to have any books that you wouldn't recommend to someone. Okay, another reason, well, someone might need them. What if we got rid of them and someone needed them? Well, let's look at the 80-20 rule. About 20% of your books are responsible for 80% of your circulation, which means there are probably some books that aren't really pulling their weight. Chances are if a book hasn't been used, it's not going to be used because, well, when Lori and Roy weeded 10%, and that's a pretty strict weeding, Lori and Roy is a former president of the American Library Association. In 1985, she weeded three public libraries, and only 1% of those weeded books were requested over the following eight months. Chances are if you get rid of something, you won't need it. The best predictor of future circulation is past circulation. So if a book hasn't been checked out, chances are it's not going to be checked out. Okay, so another reason we don't weed is, well, we haven't gotten all the good out of it yet. This book is not worn out. Well, you have to look at collection development kind of as a cycle. And you also, when we weed, we look at the particular book, the individual book, but we also have to take a bigger, a broader look and look at the whole collection. And so our cycle is we select books and then we process them, we add them to the collection, we circulate them, and then we weed and discard them. And you have to think of that as a cycle. It's ever churning, and we're always going to be adding and subtracting from our collections. If you have books that you think they're still really good that people haven't checked out, well, try putting them on a display. Good books you might have missed. Don't have too many books on the display. About 12 is a good number to start with. And see if they get checked out. If they don't, then you really know it's time for them to go. Okay, another reason you don't want to weed is, well, I don't want to admit I made a bad selection. Let's go to that old philosopher, Mae West. She tells us that all discarded books should be given a second chance, but with somebody else. So put them in the book sale, donate them to somebody else, and think that they're doing good somewhere else, but in your library, it just wasn't a good fit anymore. Well, maybe the book is valuable. We don't want to weed it and get rid of it and then find out we were sitting on a gold mine. Well, look them up. ABE Books is a place where many antiquarian book sellers offer books online. And so you can look up a book here and see what its value is. ABE Books was started by some people and this is what antiquarian rare books are one of the industries that have just really gone online completely. This was recently purchased by Amazon, so it's now owned by Amazon, but it's still its own database of rare or out-of-print books and you can look things up here. This is also, incidentally, if you really need to purchase an out-of-print book, this is one of the places you would look to see if you could find the book to buy. Then what will people say if they find books in the dumpster? What will we do? Well, you know, how many police stations have a 1985 Crown Vic parked out front? Books like every other piece of equipment lose their effectiveness. We can't keep them forever, and we shouldn't keep them forever. So don't worry about it and just tell them, well, we got a new police car, didn't we? So we should get new books, too. And people have to understand that it is a cycle. We won't have anything left if we weed everything. If we get rid of everything that's old, we won't have anything left. Well, in fact, again, we'll go back to our statistics. These were from the public library statistics that libraries submitted to us and we submit to the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The number of books purchased for every book withdrawn. Let's look at the category of libraries serving a population between 1,000 and 1,999. For every book they acquired during that year, or for every book, I'm sorry, I said that wrong, for every book they withdrew, for every book they took out of their collection, they added five books. They are not in danger of not having anything left. They are in danger of running out of room. Everyone here has a positive ratio. So everyone is adding more books than they're subtracting. So I don't think we're going to run out of books. The other thing, of course, is there are so many books. In 1920, and these numbers are from the Balker annual. In 1920, there were 6,187 books that were produced in America. In 2007, there were 185,969. Well, you know, when you get to those kind of numbers, you know you're never going to have all those books. You can't possibly have that many books. So if you can't possibly have them all, then it's okay to not have some. So you just have to have the ones that you need. But look at those numbers. Publishing has exploded. So how about the excuse to not read that the library looks fine. There's plenty of room. Well, it's a funny thing. And it's a good thing about people that when we get to know a place or we get to know a person, we don't always see them clearly anymore. We see them through a haze of memories and things we've shared and knowledge about the thing so that we don't see the thing clearly. And that's wonderful because, well, you know, we don't need to scrutinize everything. But the people who are coming in your library may not be really familiar with it. So you need to ask another librarian who's not familiar with your library how it really looks. Or sometimes it helps to take a picture. Somehow that taking a picture helps you step back from it a little bit. And you can see very clearly how things really look. The other thing is that it turns out, in studies that have been done, convenience is a huge factor in whether people check out books. So, for instance, studies show that shelves just inside the door circulate 24% more books than shelves just 15 feet inside the door. So obviously what people come to first is what they're checking out. Therefore, you want them to be able to get to the good stuff. Books, they did a study of books that were circulated from one section of shelves. And it turns out that the top row and the bottom row aren't terribly popular. So maybe you want to leave those rows empty. Maybe you want to leave enough room on the shelves that you can turn books face out. This will help people. Also, you want to think about being able to move things around from time to time so that things were on a bottom shelf and kind of in the back get to see the light of day and maybe people will find them better and check them out. But when you realize that people are going to see the first things, the first things they see or what they're going to choose, then you realize that it's important to make sure that people, it's easy for people to get at things and it's easy for people to see things. And that means that you don't want the shelves to be too crowded. In 1973, when Stanley Slote read a 20% of fiction, that's quite a lot. That's one fifth. Six months later, his circulation increased. So we know in fact that having fewer choices sometimes really works for people. There have been studies about people's behavior when they have choices. And it turns out that having too many choices sometimes kind of paralyzes people. And they actually do better when they have fewer choices. So don't worry about having a lot of books. Worry about having good books, the right books, the people want the books that people want. And of course, I'm talking about books here, I keep using the word books. Can we just agree that the word books in this case covers all library materials? Because of course, a huge piece of some library circulation is now DVDs and other media. So it's important to think about those two. Okay, and here's now an excuse. There isn't time. Well, this is real. There's only so many hours in a day. And weeding is time consuming. So what can you do? Well, first make everyone on the staff part of the weeding team. If everybody understands this is what we do with weeding, and everybody contributes, it lightens the load a bit. Then here's some tips. Weed as you go. At the circulation desk when someone returns a book is the best place to examine that book and say, whoa, this baby's really shabby. And set it aside to decide whether it really goes or not. Set small daily or weekly goals. Remember back when we said that 3% of the collect average collection for a library serving between 100 and 199 people was 224 books. So in a year, you needed to aim at discarding at least 224 books. Well, now 224 books, 52 weeks in a year. Let's give ourselves two weeks of vacation. So that's 50 weeks, 224 books. All of a sudden, we need to weed four and a half books a week. Well, you know, that's not quite one a day. We could do that. So set weekly. Don't let it get to be huge. Think of it in very small chunks. If you're a competitive person, have a contest. Give everybody in your library a section and see who can weed at the fastest. Pick another library with a similar size collection and see if you can weed better than they can weed. Form a support group. Support groups, social groups that help are really effective. You know, call yourself the reluctant weeders. And you know, check in with one another every week. Or have this group you can go to when you have a question about what you need to weed. This can be very effective. Make it visual so that you can see what progress you're making. Make a chart of the stacks and color in where you've weeded. It'll get to the point where just having that green marker, you can make one more section green is terrific. You know, these are all kind of tricks that you can do, but put their work. And have your weeding kit ready to go. Put this stuff together. Use one of the tote bags that you get at NLA and put things together. You know, have your post-it notes and your pencils and your statistics and I think, of course, a lab coat. For one thing, this makes you look terribly professional. And for another, weeding is a dirty business. So, you know, have all that stuff together so that you don't have to run around the library and gather all that stuff up. And that'll help. Okay. And number ten, I don't know where to start. Well, yeah. But to the rescue, the super librarian will help you figure out where to start when you're weeding. What is crew? Crew is a weeding manual for modern libraries. It was developed by some staffers at the Texas, well, actually for some people in public libraries in Texas, who are now, well, now she's a library school professor. But you can download it. It's the new edition. It's available to everyone and it's free. And what does crew do? Well, it gives you charts. And we're going to blow up this chart so you can see a little bit more clearly this piece of it. So it says for books that have a doing number of six, ten, and what is that? Medicine, right? If it has a copyright date of more than five years old, you really need to think about weeding it. If it hasn't been checked out for three years, you really need to think about weeding it. And then if it has any of the musty characteristics of what are those? Well, if they're musty. Remember, mustiness is mold. And mold is a living thing. Mold grows and mold will move from book to book. So you really do want to get musty stuff out of your collection. It's really important and not let your collection be damp. If it's ugly, now, books are not human beings. And it's okay to say it's ugly and you need to get rid of it just on that shallow basis that it's ugly. Because you know what, people won't choose it if it's ugly. So remember, they're not people and their feelings are not going to be heard. If it's superseded, if there is a more recent book with better information in it, if it's trivial, these books can be fun for a while but then it's time to move on. If it's irrelevant to your collection, a wonderful history, local history of a small town in Ohio, probably you don't need in a collection in Nebraska. Or if it's available elsewhere, if you can get it through interlibrary loan, maybe you don't need it in your collection. So again, to weed or not to weed. Here's a checklist of factors that may affect your weeding that you need to think about. First, the intellectual content. Look at the book. Who wrote it? Is this an expert? Who published it? Is this a reputable publisher? What's the date? What's the reading level? Is it of current interest? Then look at the aesthetic content. Are the illustrations pleasing? Is it a well-designed book? Is it appealing? Then look at its physical collection and this is one of the easiest things to determine. If it's really in bad shape, maybe you don't want to keep it. Then look at its circumstances. Its circulation statistics. Has it circulated? As we said, the best indicator of whether a book will be checked out is has it been checked out in the past? Are there other copies of it? Maybe you don't need eight copies of it anymore. As a bestseller, maybe you do need eight copies right for six months or a year, but after that you'd probably get rid of some of them. How expensive would it be to replace it? If it's a really good book, but it's really shabby, maybe you want to just buy a new one. Do you have similar resources? It's very easy when there's a subject of genuine interest, say the Gulf War. As people came home from the Gulf War, a number of them wrote a memoir. Every memoir got good reviews and you bought these memoirs because people in your town were interested. Now you find you have a little distance from the Gulf War and you own 18 memoirs. And well, maybe you don't need all of them anymore. And yes, these are difficult decisions, which of them to keep and which of them to discard, but if you have that many resources in that area, maybe you need to part with some of them. And the suitability of the book does it contribute to the mission of your library? Again, a wonderful book written in Mandarin Chinese cannot be something you need in your library unless the high school is teaching Mandarin Chinese or you have a sister city in China or there are some people in your town who are going to be traveling to China and they want to show what a book from China looks like. But you need to look at is it suitable? Is it really contributing to the mission of your library? And of course in a school, does it support the curriculum? So that's what, whether you would weed or not to weed, some of the things you need to think about. Okay, one of the first things that helps you weed is your library selection policy. And yes, it's really hard to put together one of these things. But the better the selection policy, the more help it will be to you. A selection policy should include de-selection criteria. It should say, well yes, in our area of Dewey where we have the medical books, we will not keep anything more than so many years old. It tells kind of. It should have a weeding schedule. Some sections of the library need to be weeded more often than others. Philosophy, you probably don't need to weed that often. Travel books, you probably do. And talk about disposal methods because how are you going to remove these books from your premises? Here's some sample policy language I found in a workshop at InfoPeople, which is in California, but I just really liked this because I thought it really summed it up. Each item through its quality, reliability, current usefulness and appearance must earn its place on the shelf and contribute to the reliability, reputation, and attractiveness of the library. Doesn't that just sum it up for you? Yeah, I really like that sentence. We want to consider weeding duplicate copies, items in poor condition, drab items that get lost on the shelves. Remember, put them in a display and if they still aren't checked out, then you know that it's time. Older single titles by an author, obscure or femoral titles, knock-offs of popular authors, lesser works of authors who have died. In other words, they're not going to be producing any more books. Minor author or poet collections series books when titles are missing simplified or abridged classics. These are places where you can say maybe we ought to. Doesn't necessarily mean absolutely you must, but it's a good indicator. So the steps to weeding, well first you want to gather your usage statistics because this is one of the things you're going to use, one of the major things you're going to use to help you determine whether to weed. Maintain your weeding kit. Remember you're going to look so spiffy in that lab coat. Then kind of eyeball the area you're going to be weeding. Oh, look it over. Is it real crowded? Does it look shabby? Even take a picture. That's the wonderful thing about digital cameras. You can just take pictures. Then weed. Then double check in indexes and bibliographies about anything you had a question about and then dispose of the weed and stuff. Either discard it or recycle it, sell it, put it in the book sale, donate it, send it to a library in Africa. There are lots of things and you'll probably use all of these things. You would discard a book that was in very bad condition. You would discard a book that had misinformation in it. You would recycle something that you could remove the cover from and have the paper recycled. You would sell a book that you think someone still might have an interest in but is no longer right for your library. You would donate books the same way or because you knew that a particular library needed books in particular subjects. Then after you do that, you want to order replacements or develop a wish list to reorder because there are places where you're going to discard books because they were very, very shabby or just falling apart or because they had misinformation but you need then some more books in that subject area. Then you're going to merchandise those circulating high-quality items. That's where the displays come in. Remember, you don't want too many books on a display. Displays do not have to be elaborate. In fact, there's some indication that it's better if they're not too elaborate. You don't want too many books. A dozen between 12 and 20. If people take a few books from the display, they're going to have more to put on the display. Displays can be very simple. Good books you might have missed. Great reads for a cold January. Take some home today. That's all you need to do. We have a question. I don't know of anything specifically. If people are interested in that, I'd be happy to do some work to look for some. Then I can either put it in our blog or put up a web page about it. It might take me a few weeks but I will do that. Here's a Swiffer Duster coupon. Remember, I said that you almost have to dust in self-defense while you're weeding. If you haven't tried Swiffer's, they're really great. I would love to be able to give each of you a Swiffer but the best I can do is tell you that this is where you can get a coupon. Now we have some advice for specific sections when weeding. Picture books. Think boutique. Try to keep the best. Try to keep it looking good. Be aware of ephemeral interests. Dinosaurs are not ephemeral. Replace your board books because they do get a lot of abuse and they get pretty shabby pretty fast if they've been chewed on. Replace worn copies of perennial favorites. Good Night Moon. Some of those books that people read is when they were children that they want to read to their children. Mike Mulligan. Even One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. These are things you probably need to replace worn copies. Look into seeing if you can get library bindings on some of these things that are very popular because they will hold up a little better. Also, you might want to think about, what would you call it, defensive repair. You might want to think about, for instance, taping spines before you put the book on the shelf even to help it hold up for little hands that just aren't always well, it's not that they're careless. It's that they don't quite have that control. So another advice for specific sections, why a fiction? Be ruthless. They do have fads. Currencies key. They like paperbacks because they're easier to carry around. And if a book is more than five years old, remove if it's not circulating well. Keep old stuff because the kids will think that the whole library is old and musty then. For children's and young adult nonfiction, remember anything is not better than nothing. You want specifically good things. Be aware of online resources. You don't want to have books that have poor information and the misinformation. And use the crew guidelines just as you would in the adult sections. Other children's and young adult issues. Excuse me. You'll often see abridged classics. No, they're very often poor quality and you don't need to keep those. Series books, they can be very popular while the kids are reading the series and then all of a sudden they're done and you'll never see that series circulate again. Older titles. Beware of a dated look. You want these things to look fresh. Worn classics should be replaced. People will still, you will still have folks reading Black Beauty, but you want it to look like a fresh book. Any geography titles older than five years old, toss them, science, medicine, invention. These are things that change rapidly, so you need to be sure that you're updating those. And text books. Many libraries don't keep text books at all. Sometimes a text book can be very useful because it will have basic information on a subject so you might want a text book or you might want text books that are being used by the schools in your area or the homeschool kids. Might find text books useful. But look at them carefully. Then another special section is reference and I think we've all downsized reference in the last five years or so. But remember that older editions may be weeded when they're superseded. When you get a new almanac, you can weed them. I would recommend some of these things if you have the room and if you feel that people might want to do historical research on some things, maybe you don't want to keep every almanac but you could keep all the almanacs that end in when the year ends in zero or zero and five. Think about that kind of thing and also think about, for instance, an older edition of an encyclopedia that's not too old, you might want to put in circulation for a while. Evaluate the materials periodically because maybe you don't need a reference book in that area anymore. You want to look at different replacement schedules. The new editions might not be as frequent. On the other hand, Gail seems to still be putting things out every year and maybe you don't need to replace a book every year. Maybe every other year is enough. Really think about your replacement schedules. Keep your websites and databases in mind. Sometimes, for instance, travel books. I don't think we need travel books nearly as much as we used to because there's so much on the internet. Consider integrating reference materials into the circulating collection and consider using the circulating collection for reference when you need to. We may want reference collections still, but you might want to keep them very small and have most of your collection circulating. For periodicals, you want current use periodicals because older issues do tend to be online. Does this mean that, for instance, if you have those old bound volumes of Life Magazine from World War II, you should get rid of them? Oh, I hate to see them go. On the other hand, are people using them? You really have to think about it. They do take up a lot of room. Really think about the mission of your collection. If you are not there to provide research materials for people, then maybe you don't need to keep those things. Do you let back issues of your periodical circulate? How do your periodical circulate? The full text availability, are they available online or not? Of course, one of the problems is that many things are available online but only the last 10 or 15 years. If you think older things are going to be needed, then you might need to move on to them. These are tough decisions to make. Space is a real issue because periodicals can sure eat up the space. But in many public libraries, especially public libraries with basically popular collections, periodicals have become a current reading kind of thing and you don't keep them for research anymore. Another specific section, media. If it's worn out, out of date, rarely used supplies elsewhere or trivial, get rid of it. Also keep a good eye on the condition of your media. CDs and DVDs can get scratched up. It's frustrating for your users. You want to be sure that you try to keep the things in good condition. What things do you keep? Well, volumes of sets and series with special merit. What does that mean? Well, something that people are using. Something that has a local history. That's an important thing to keep. These, as I said, these things take professional judgment. These are not easy or automatic answers. Older reference works augmented by later editions. So for instance, Bartlett's familiar quotations is not completely replaced by a new edition. So you may want to keep some old editions of those depending again on how people use them. Local history. You definitely want to keep your local history. If that's part of your mission, in many, many public libraries it is. If local history is not part of your mission, then you may want to donate things to the historical society. Works by local authors you might want to keep. And let's face it, if you have a book that's by a local author or there's some reason to keep something, some specific reason, write it in the book. You know, get a pencil out, decide that you're always going to write your notes on, I don't know, I would say the verso, the back side of the title page. And write a note. When you write notes, always date them, always initial them, so they know who did this and when they did it, but put it in the book. You're keeping it because of this. So somebody else in 15 years doesn't have to look it all up again. It's just, you know, another practice. Then the classics. As librarians, is it our duty to expose people to great literature or is it our duty to have things on the shelf that people actually want to read and will they read those classics unless a movie comes out and then maybe they will. It's a debate. And I don't think you have to be all one way or another. I think you can kind of say, well, these classics are being read in the school or this might be good for the book club, but this one no one's going to read. It's true. Probably your personal prejudices will get in the way. I myself would have a hard time justifying keeping very much Henry James. But this doesn't mean I don't think or don't know that Henry is supposed to be, you know, good stuff. So you kind of have to know yourself and know a little bit about the literature and you can't always go by what the experts say. You kind of have to develop your own expertise for your library, your group of users. That wasn't terribly helpful, wasn't I'm sorry. But it is. It's a place where you kind of have to come to your own and you're probably not going to be completely consistent and maybe that's okay. How often between systematic reviews? Now I think this is really useful because for instance the Dewey zeroes probably every three years. And look at the 200s at philosophy again. Every five years is plenty. The 800s, the literature every five years is plenty. But on the other hand those 600s which is your technology every two years. You really want to look at it. Fiction every couple of years. A large print of course is fiction. Paperbacks simply because of condition. You know they just don't last as long. But people like to read them. Sometimes they're good. For a few extra copies of a very popular title. There are a lot of good, especially genre fiction, westerns, mysteries, romances that are only going to come out in paperback. So you can't neglect paperbacks. But at the same time because they tend to fall apart, you have to look them over very carefully after a year or so. Scores if you have a lot of music every five years. Be sure that they remain complete and they remain a decent condition. Media every couple of years. Really check the condition. Software every couple of years. So it does depend on what not only the physical format but the content is as to how often you really need to go through it. And what are some of the keys to reading success? Well, make reading part of policy. If reading's important, then say up front that it's important. Build reading into the regular work schedule. It's easy to put off a project. It's easy to not start a project. But if it's just one of the regular things you do, I think it's more important. It'll tend to get done. Inventory as you read. You may be surprised at how much you're discarding from your collection that you didn't know you were discarding. So you need to, you know, be a little aware of that. Follow up on your questions or problems. There's always going to be some things that you're not sure whether you should read or not. The thing to do is to look up book reviews. Really take a look at whether this book is suitable for your library. And then have a posse, as I said, have a support group that you can turn to and say, hey guys, what do you think about this? And then I think one of the keys is always consider the collection as a whole. Yes, when we're reading, we think about the particular item. But what you have to do is think about how that item contributes to the whole. No one item is going to make or break you. So you need to always think about the whole collection. And you need to think about your community as well. So what are some things that can help? This book by Stanley J. Sloat, Reading Library Collections, can be very useful. This Less Is More, this is the book that came out of the Sunlink Project out in Florida, where they were weeding school libraries. But this is a really good practical collection. It's about school libraries, but I think it would be very useful even for a lot of public libraries. This is a collection development plan for the Skokie Public Library. It is notable for its astonishing size. It's almost, when you look at it, you think, oh my goodness, these people really, really are on top of this. Well, they are. The Skokie Public Library, it's a suburb of Chicago, is a remarkable collection. It's a good size public library as those things go. But they have really worked on their collection development plan, and they will say in this area we collect this kind of book, we keep it for this long. Anyway, their insights into some of these things you might find useful. And then the American Library Association does have a fact sheet about weeding, which is really a bibliography of other materials on weeding, but it's online. We'll find that at ALA. And then Reward Yourself. You did a great job! So pat yourself on the back, have some chocolate, and enjoy your beautiful, neat, weeded library. And thank you. Do you have any questions? We do have one comment that's come in in response to the where can you donate your books. Casey from Melville University said, we use better world books, and they are awesome. They send boxes, and they give you back some money when they sell the books. So better world books is the recommendation. Such a deal! Are they on the web? I assume so. Okay. Speaking of things on the web, I just wanted to mention that any of the links to be included will be on our delicious account, and they will be linked to the recording for this presentation. So you don't have to worry about hopping down any of the URLs that Laura threw at you. We can probably include the WorldCat records for those books you mentioned. We're trying to write down these wonderful resources. One last housekeeping thing I don't think I mentioned was that if you have somebody else watching with you whose name was not included on the login, go ahead and type that in the question box. We can make sure everybody gets credit for being here. Yes, Casey says betterworldbooks.com is the website for that. Betterworldbooks.com. I don't write that down. If there are any more questions, please go ahead and either type them in or raise your hand and we can unmute you. Thank you Laura for a wonderful presentation. Very informative. Well, if anybody has any questions, I'm here. And I'd be happy to help you. As I said, there are things that will help that can help you. At some point, judgment does come into play. And knowledge of your community is an important thing. Casey says betterworldbooks, recycles what they don't sell and gives a portion of the proceeds to charity. That's nice. No, thank you, Casey. That's great. You must have answered everybody's questions. I guess I must have. Thank you, Laura, for presenting. Thank you all for attending. Well, thank you, everyone. We hope to see you again for another Encompass Live. Bye. Have a good day.