 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. We're a webinar. We're an online show held every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. However, if you are unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show every week. So if you can't join us on Wednesdays, you can always go back to our website and look through our archives to watch any of our previous shows. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues who may be interested in any of our topics at our shows. They can come join us Wednesday morning, sign up, or just go ahead and watch our recordings. I'll show you at the end of today's show where all those archives are available for you so you can take a look at them later. We do, speaking of the topics, we do a mixture of things here on the show. Book reviews, interviews, many training sessions, demos of services and products, resources for librarians and libraries. Basically, the only criteria is that something is library related. Something libraries are doing, something that we think that could be doing. Services and resources since we're here in Nebraska, things that we at the Library Commission provide to libraries. So we will have some sessions that are very Nebraska-centric when there are services and programs. But everything will come out and be about libraries. Sometimes you might look at some titles or some sessions and people get creative with those and think, why is that on the show? What does this have to do with libraries? But trust me, everything comes around to libraries in the end. That's my only rule that it is, of course. And all types of libraries. We here at the Library Commission, we are the state agency for libraries. So ours is here at the state library. And we serve public academic, school, institutional, correctional facilities, museum libraries, anything that's a library. There will be topics on the show. We've been doing Encompass Live since January 2009. So there is quite a big archive back there. So there's definitely something you could find that would be of interest to you. As I said, we do do sessions. We do have sessions that are specifically in the Nebraska Library Commission related things and we have commission staff come on. But we also bring in guest speakers. And today, I guess you're kind of both. You're a guest speaker, but you're also part of the Library Commission. Today, our topic is Weeding. We're going to explore different route and traffic gardening today. No, no, no. This is Library Weeding, a topic that is near and dear to some people and terrifying to others. And to talk about this with us today is Denise Harders, who is still co-director. Tell me, 15th of October. Okay, co-director of our Central Plains Library System. For those of you not from Nebraska, we have four regional library systems that are, I can't think of them as like outreach from the Library Commission. They're associated with the Library Commission in different regions and there are people on the ground working with libraries and training and consulting and helping out libraries in their area. And Denise has a session that she's done quite a few times doing around the state reading and specifically in their area of the state they do a special little program to pretty much every year that she's going to talk about as well. So I'll just hand over to Denise to take a word and tell us how to do a reading. Well, they're all getting really dirty. Yeah, a little bit dirty. Depending on how old your library is, it can be really dirty. And this is it. I thank you for having me, Krista. This is a topic, as you said, that makes some people fearful. The biggest fear I ever hear is, what if it's something important? What if it's something we need? And we're going to address that as we go along. But truthfully, if you have a library, you must read. There we go, there we go. All right, so let's start with a little bit of a definition. Deselection, it's selection in reverse. And it's because you have to look on a regular basis of what's on your shelf, if it's still being used, if it's something useful for your community or if it needs to go. And so that's, the weeding part is when it goes. It's essential to do this, even though it is difficult, because shelves are not unending. Yes. Every library has a finite amount of space, and if you don't weed, eventually you're overrun. So there's a couple of reasons, right here in the beginning I want to talk about, that weeding is helpful. Weeding is helpful to your customers, to your patrons, because it allows you to give them an interesting and clean space. They can see the material that's there, and sometimes they find something they're not expecting, simply because they're able to browse effectively. Now for the librarian, weeding has many advantages, but one major one is that it helps you find the gaps in your collection. You can make purchases with confidence. If you know, hey, we don't have any current books on how to coach baseball. Come the beginning of summer, you'll want to have a few new things on that topic. So you can buy with confidence, and the weeding creates space for the materials that you do buy. Now, most of us were taught by our parents and teachers to treat books with great respect. I remember taking home the note about wash your hands, don't have dirty hands when you're looking at the school's library books. And it's important, yes, to have respect for the printed material. The problem is, when it's time to weed, we confuse the information contained within the package with the packaging. Now, there are a lot of great excuses for not weeding. Well, they're not really great, but they're kind of funny sometimes. One that I hear is, I bought this book. The one I really hate to hear is, I bought this book and it's never gone out. Now, that happens. So you have to be aware. So you have a personal vested interest in it. But you think, hey, I really thought this was an interesting book. I knew several people that I thought would check it out, and it just never happened. Well, there's a few things you can do to address that, and we'll do that as we go along. But you really need to consider and think of your personal responsibility to the collection as a whole. If it's not earning its keep, the book doesn't get to stay. Now, the award winning and classics, we'll look at that as we go along too. How about the one someone might need it? I know that the minute I throw it out, the next person in the door is going to ask for that book. Well, that probably does happen. I think it's more of an urban legend than truth. But if someone needs something that you no longer have, you have two choices. You can buy another copy, or you can interlibrary loan it from another larger library, probably that has more space than you do. Interlibrary loan is a great resource for libraries, and you don't have to own everything. No, and you can't. You can't own everything. Yeah, it's not physically possible. You do need to realize that I don't have everything here, but that's okay. I can always get it from someone else. Libraries are all about sharing. Yep, access to it is all that's important. Now, as you read down through that list, one that's not there that you might think of is, it's taxpayer money. What's going to happen when people see me throwing out books? I'm wasting taxpayer money. Well, it's more of a waste of taxpayer dollars to keep outdated or ugly books on the shelf, because time is money too. Your patrons come in the door. They have a certain amount of time to spend. Some of them. Some can lull a gag all day, and we all love those. But this, you know, they shouldn't have to waste time digging through all these old, ugly books to find what they're looking for. Books are valuable. I agree. Books are valuable. But if the information contained within them is outdated, even dangerously outdated, and I know that sounds a bit dramatic, but I have seen a book that was recently pulled off someone's shelf. That talked about the health benefits of smoking. It was published in the 40s. It was still on the shelf. That's stunning. The benefits of smoking. So, sometimes nothing is better than junk. So remember that phrase in your head, sometimes nothing is better than junk, because it gets a little scary sometimes. If we're weeding a collection that hasn't been weeded in a long time, Oh, you're going to find those books. You think, you find those really old ones, and you're thinking, where is there a new book, something from the year 2000? And we're talking 17 years ago. Today's high school seniors were born in the year 2000. So that's really not a very good guideline anymore. They keep moving that old date. We need to keep moving that ahead, because oh my gosh, 2000 to me sounds, oh that's fairly new. It's not. So, now we're going to talk real specifically about the benefits of weeding in a library. Now what you need to know is, library shelves should never be more than 85% full. 75% is better. That means, if you measure your shelf, divide it by four, and that number of inches at the end should be empty. And I can't tell you how many times people look at me and say, what are you talking about? If I have empty space at the end of each and every shelf, my community is going to lynch me. No. It's good to have that space at the end. It allows for face forward display, for one thing. Yeah, you can use an empty space at the end. So really, you can put up signage. You can do shelf displays. There's lots of things you can do with that little bit of space. But now, shelf space costs money. Library shelves are valuable real estate. Every book on that shelf needs to earn its key. It costs money to purchase more shelving. And that's if you even have room for it. So that's one thing to consider. Think about who has to do the shifting. And if it's you, you'll know what I'm talking about. How many times do you look at a shelf and say, that one's full. I don't have time to shift. Lay it up on top of the shelf. Put it on top of the books right in the area where it's supposed to be. Stand it up on the floor. I've been in a lot of libraries where there are a lot of books because of the lack of time to shift. That they're not where they're supposed to be. The books don't end up on the shelf. That can get patrons really frustrated. Now think about if you've got your really tight shelf and your patron sees something they want, they reach in inevitably, put their finger on the top of the spine and pull. If it's a little bit of an older book, chances are it's going to tear down. So number one, the books get damaged if there's no room on the shelf. Then things get damaged. So that's a huge benefit of weeding is that space that you're saving. Once again, I mentioned time. Your busy patrons don't want to look through old inaccurate material looking for the one new book that you find on their topic. And believe me, it makes readers' advisory much easier in the fiction section if you have a pretty good idea of what is in your collection. And if you do have something I was thinking about, the fact that people say, I mentioned earlier about people being concerned that if my shelves aren't full, the community is going to be up and I was like, why are you not filling every inch of the space? Another thing that I think would be a good answer to people who say that is we need to have room to grow. We've got to have, do you want us to buy new books? We need to have somewhere to put them. So we have to take out the old one, we have to have the room, and we knew that there's some new blockbuster book coming out. We know there's going to be an update to this teen series of books. We have to have the room to put in the new ones without having to, every single time you buy something new, shift everything. You've got to have that space there for when you have the new things that are coming in. So that's a way to address those concerns of some people who might say, why isn't this filled up? And where have all the books gone? And I think if people are given an idea of what's going on, they're much more... Be transparent about it. Yes, why you're doing it, like some of the information you're going to learn today is ways that you can answer two people's questions about it. Well, a lot of times I recommend not wait for the questions. I recommend being transparent. Make sure your staff is on board. Make sure your library board knows what you're doing and your regular customers who come in who might see a shelf change over a day's time. If they come in every other day and they see all of a sudden there's this one section that has a lot more space, let them know what you're doing. So then we're still on the benefits of waiting. The appeal. Customers are attracted to newer looking material. And it's not only children. Adults are the same way. If you put... It doesn't matter what the title is. People are attracted to things that look newer. And there is the one thing I can say that you can take to the bank. Circulation will increase after waiting. Yeah, that's like, it's been studied. It's a no. It's a no. It seems like, but we'll have less. We have less material. How can circulation increase? Your numbers will go up. They can finally see the good stuff they want to check out. And if you are looking to increase your circulation and sometimes it's important to your funding agency, to your library board, they'll say, gosh, what's going on with our circulation here? Why aren't we checking out more books? Tell them you need a waiting project because circulation will increase after that. Now, your library's reputation is something that you really need to guard. You want to have a good reputation. You want to be seen as someplace where people can go and find reliable information. Accurate. And if they feel like, if they walk in and say, there's nothing here but a bunch of old books, and they turn around and walk out, how many times do you think that is said in their neighborhood to their family? There's no point in going back there. There's nothing there but a little book. They're going to say that to other people, yeah. And if the library comes up, they're sure going to say it. So you keep that reputation for having current material and people need to trust that you have good stuff so make sure they can see it. Now, this last one is specifically for the librarian. It gives you constant feedback. You can identify where there are holes in your collection because if you're going through and weeding, you're looking at each area. So you can see where there are things missing. It will help you prepare a wish list. Now, and this is not about weeding, but it's something that you need to know for sure is prepare a wish list. Have something, several things that you think people might honestly decide to purchase for you but you never know. The next person in the door might say to you, we have some memorial money in our family and we'd like to get something for the library. And if you stand in stutter, you don't know what you need and you don't have something specific, then you might not get that memorial money. So this is a way at the same time, you can kill two birds with one stone here, something that some libraries do in retail and stores they do is an inventory. What do we have, what are we short of, what keeps getting purchased or checked out. At the same time as doing your weeding, this is how you do your version of an inventory. What do we have books on topics, what are we missing books on topics, what if I just read out this old book about, I don't know, some old medical book or something. The benefits of smoking, and then you make a note, this is a good book but it is dated so I need a new version of this. And it might be some kind of pricey so it could go on your wish list. Exactly. And it makes you so that you're really familiar with what's on the shelf, so when someone does walk in and asks for something on the topic. Yes we have that, I just saw it. You can walk right to it. The one other thing that I want to mention here is if you're considering changing your automation system. When you move to a new ILS, generally you pay per record, meaning per item that you add. You do not want to be paying for the old stuff, stuff that's, that crayon marks in it, that the pages are torn, that the spine is ripped, or just plain old. I consider it to have been circulated and not circulate, that's a waste of money. It is a terrible waste of money. So consider that. Now we talk about weeding factors and as you look at this, you think, oh my gosh, this is way too many things to consider. How am I ever going to think of all these things as I'm looking at each book? It does get really confusing. Now the first thing on the list, physical condition, that's the easiest one to leave for. You can even have volunteers because what you want them to do is go to the picture book area open every single picture book, see if the pages are torn, see if there's coloring, see if there's unidentifiable stains. You don't want to do those unidentifiable stains. Or even identify the ones that you know would happen to you. So your volunteer can make a cart for you of the picture books that have physical issues. Then all you have to do is go back and look for other factors. And I say picture books because they generally are the ones that are in the toughest shape. We get a lot of use of the one. Well, and three year olds. Yeah, of course. So that's the one your volunteers can do. Now what you want to do though is make weeding more simple than this. Make it simple using the crew method of weeding. Crew stands for continuous review evaluation weeding. It was developed by the Texas State Library. It is free to download. The website is there on the screen. I do recommend that you print it because it's not easy to use on a screen. It's much easier to carry with you. I do have to say you need to be ready to print a lot because it is 108 pages long. And it has been updated to include what to do about e-books. People don't think about meeting to weed e-books. Oh sure. But there comes a time. Right now we started doing old net library collections in the 2000s. I think it first was in 2000 maybe. So there's definitely going to be things in your e-book collection that also get dated just like your physical collection. And this manual has what to do with those as well. So crew, if you're going to go with the crew method, this is what you need to do. You weed a little bit every day. You might pick a shelf or a range. Something that you can look at in a few minutes time, 15 minutes. As you're checking material in, you look for stuff that's shabby. Just flip through it. When you pick the books up out of the book drop, open each one. I know it seems like that takes a ton of time, but really if you find something that's got gum sticking the pages together, you might not see it if you just scan it and put it on the shelf or the cart to be shelved. So just flip through the pages and look for things that have been damaged or outdated. Now as you go around shelving, look for those duplicates. Maybe you buy more than one copy of the best seller when it first comes out. I know there's libraries in our area that buy more than one. Some of them loan them. They have the things they're first published. But look for those unused duplicates because they take up an incredible amount of space. When things are first published, they're popular and everybody wants to read it. If you do holds in your library, you've got a huge long hold list. The interest is going away. And you don't need all those duplicates. And then you can pick the one in the best condition to keep and get rid of the rest of them. Now you might want to look and as you're shelving, you might shelve on one side of some books and then on the other side, but it seems like they're always there. Pull them out and look at them. See what it is. They may have an attractive cover, but I get it how many times do you hear said don't judge a book by its cover, but everybody does. So look at the unattractive, see if it's an unattractive cover. Maybe there's something you can do. Maybe there's a display you can make. Maybe it's the second book by an author who really should have been a one book wonder. Their first book was so popular when their second one was published, they thought, oh, I need to buy this. Then nobody reads it. So see if that's what your shelf sitter is. Double check and see if you have any of those simplified or the abridged classics. I mean, if you're going to keep the classics, keep the real thing. The ones with the pictures drawn and they're not going to help. If a child comes in and says, I need to read Treasure Island, they really need to read Treasure Island. Not an abridged classic. So pull those out. The last thing you might want to check for is if it's catalogued incorrectly. Look at the doing number. Is that why people aren't finding it? Maybe people aren't finding it. Check the subject headings. Look at the book. See if the subject headings in your catalog match what actually is in the book. You might need to recaddle up it. So those are all things that you can do just a little bit each day. And they think, well, that takes up all of what I have time for today. But it doesn't. When it becomes part of your routine, it will really help your collection. And I like that this is the very first thing there. A little bit every day. This does not have to be a huge project with a capital P. And oh my gosh, we have to do this. I'll put it off. It's going to be so many. Close the library. The entire collection. I have to go through it all. Oh my gosh. It's going to take me this whole week. No. You're going to do it every single day throughout the year as a regular maintenance type thing. And like checking the materials and checking it, it will become a habit. We realize, I think things are looking good. I want to keep it looking good. When books come in, you're going to say, is this one worth it? Is it going to become part of your team, part of your habit? Is this book worth keeping in the collection? Do I need to rethink it? Do I need a different copy? And you just put it in your schedule maybe 15 minutes, 20 minutes from 11.30 to noon. This is what I do before the big lunch rush or before the kids come in after school. I can do a quick run through of things. Put it on your calendar as an official thing for the kids. Right. And you will still have to go out to the shelf and actually look through each item because not everything is checked out. That's the issue. That's why they have to be leaving. So when you're looking at the crew manual, this formula is in front of each range in the Dewey list. So if you're looking at the psychology, they will have this formula. What it means is the first X stands for the copyright date. So is the item more than X years old? So for psychology, it could be five. I don't know. I didn't look. But it could be. So if it said five, what you're supposed to check for and see if the copyright date is more than five years old. If it is, that's a reason you may want to consider leading it. Now, crew along with every other method of leading is a guideline. You know your community. You know your collection. You know what has been checked out or what might be checked out. I mean, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but you have a good idea of the assignments that are given at the school. So it's always a guideline. Then when you look at the middle X, it's the maximum permissible time without use. That means has it not checked out in the last three years? So if it's more than five years old and it has been on the shelf for two solid years, maybe you'll want to get rid of it. And that's what's so great about crew is it breaks it down. There's different numbers in there for the psychology and the science. This isn't a cut and dry. Every single book in your collection is the same calculation. Right. It's going to vary. There is no hard memory. Everything, although a certain number of years old has to go. Everything that hasn't circulated in the last three years has to go. That is not what we're saying. I've had people say this to me. That's not true. They've misunderstood that these things we've mentioned them. That's not how it works. It has everything as a case-by-case basis, but this is a guideline to get you started at least thinking about it. And then you'll decide depending on the topic, depending on, like you just said, your local school's curriculum, your university's curriculum, or your K-12, you know what they do need. And you wouldn't read that stuff. Right. The stuff they aren't doing, you wouldn't read. So the last piece of the formula is called musty. And those, once again, another thing that stands for here, musty stand M is for misleading. And that's the A number one. If there's any reason to take a book out, there's no saving grace. I don't care if it looks brand new. If it is inaccurate information, it is misleading, and it must go. So that's, there's just nothing more on that. Then you have to look at it and say, is this an ugly book? Now we've all seen ugly books. So you can identify it once you see it, but you need to consider what is the condition. Is there any sign of mold or mildew? Is there, it may look great except for those little black spots along the spine. It's time to get rid of it. That's a health issue too. Yes, for some people it's a health issue with asthma or breathing issues. Right. It can be very dangerous. And it spreads in your collection. Yeah. You need to get rid of the ugly stuff. Okay. Then has it been superseded? That means is it outdated? And the example I always think of here is when Pluto was declared to be no longer a planet. So we felt bad for Pluto, but we really felt bad for the space section of every library because now you have information that has been superseded. It's outdated. There is no longer a planet named Pluto. And you need to get rid of that stuff because the third grader coming in won't remember that. They won't know. They won't have any knowledge that it used to be. Right. So yeah, that has to go. Tea, trivial, meaning no longer of interest. And this is a hard one I think. And so I looked up a little bit about it and what I found said triviality implies the material included in the item was popular for a very brief period of time, but the interest now has largely waned. Books are published seemingly overnight when there's a new fad or when a new celebrity hits the scene. And biographies of pop culture performers, games and consumer products, television shows, diets, that's a big one. And fiction series come and go very quickly. And the interest may last a few months or maybe even a few years, but it fades fast. So a lot of them have published our paperbacks. They hit the shelf. And as long as people are still interested in it and pretty soon that topic is gone. So when you see something trivial that is no longer of interest, you'll recognize it and you'll know what it is. Now, I, irrelevant, that is based on your own community. Now, if you live in the flatlands like we do here in Nebraska, that doesn't mean you not necessarily want books about how to hike in the mountains. You might want one or two here because people vacation there all the time, but you don't need a massive quantity of books on a topic such as mountain climbing when you, because it's not necessarily relevant to your daily population. I can say remember the people who go on vacation, but watch for things, the purchase of things where it's just irrelevant. And then E stands for elsewhere and we've talked about that already. It's interlibrary lung. So to start reading, you need to get, you really, you've done your everyday kind of thing and you look at your shelves and you think, yep, I need to go there, I need to start. So you gather your usage statistics. You can generally run a report from your ILS that gives you last date of checkout or if you're using pockets and cards, of course you've got your card right there. You know the last time it was checked out. So once you have your usage statistics then you need weeding tools. You need little slips of paper they can have. You can make really detailed ones or it could just be a slip of paper. What happens with those is if you pull a book off the shelf and you think, wow, this one really needs to be replaced. This is a very popular topic. You can just write replace on it, stick that slip in the book, put it on the shelf or on the book truck that you have brought out with you. Then depending on what you want each thing to happen to each book you just make a quick note because believe me, you get that to the back room then you're stuck trying to figure out why did I put this on the card. So make sure to have a shelf marker because if your shelves are really tight when you pull one out the space disappears and you don't want to spend all of your time looking at the... Forgetting where you left off. Yeah. You're doing some sexuality. If you answer the phone or go get a drink or it just looked down and looked back up again then you've got to figure out where it's going. So it's just easier. Have a shelf marker. Of course you'll need your book truck, a pencil to make notes and that crew manual will be invaluable. You do examine the section item by item. People have asked, well why don't you just pull off the ones that look bad? No. You need to look at each item. They may look perfect and they may be outdated. So pull it off the shelf. Look at it. If nothing else you can grab a dust rag and dust underneath as you go. Sometimes it's hard to determine if you should keep something and there are tools for that and you can use the core collection books that you can borrow from the commission here. There's the fiction core collection, children's core collection and the public library core collection for nonfiction and what those do for you is if you're looking at a book and you're thinking, should I keep this? You can look up in that core collection book and see if it's something that is recommended to be saved. If you do that, I wouldn't make a note inside back cover, small note with a pencil. Check core collection and put a date so that you know, because believe me, you never remember everything and it's hard to sometimes pinpoint why you've done something. With this reading being an ongoing process, at some point you'll come back to that section. Maybe in five years, but it'd be nice to know five years ago, what was I thinking? Or if that's true, if there's a different person that comes in who does that, they'll be able to look and see, oh, this is what they did. It was in the core collection. This is why, yeah. So then you get that book cart back to your office or behind the desk or wherever you go and you need to start distributing the books where they go. The bindery, I save that for things that you really need to keep that are out of print, like things for your genealogy collection. Mending is also a little bit tricky if you don't have somebody that knows how to mend or likes to mend. Mending can be a black hole where things go and it can be a fairly popular book when it goes there, but if nobody ever gets the mending done, or fixes it yet, then you just as well get rid of it. So if you're going to discard, replace it if you want a new copy. Make sure you've written replace or if you're going to recycle something. Now, as we talked about, you can display those low circulating items. If you have something that looks great, it's a book of crafts that you thought everybody was going to want tomorrow. Display it. Have a whole display of craft books from that area and see if they go out. Maybe you don't have as many crafters in town as you thought. You may come up with ideas for just display ideas as you're going through the books. You'll say, look at all these different, like the one-shot books. But then there's the follow-up. That would be great to create a theme around that and you'll come up with these ideas. So, and as, like you say, you go through range by range. Make sure and say, okay, I've gone through these three shelves. The next three are going to be for next month. Put it on your calendar. Write down where you're going to start so that you remember. Because once again, it's easy to forget. Now, how much to read? Because this is a fear. I'm going to get rid of too many books. How could I, what should I do? Well, 5% is one thing that you hear. And as you're reading about reading, you see 5%. This allows for the turnover of the collection every 20 years. And what that, it doesn't literally mean that no book that's there today will be gone 20 years. Everything will be gone. But it's important that turnover is something that the commission looks at in the accreditation process. And actually, the commission accreditation standard is a minimum of 3%. Yeah, we'll give you a little bit. That's somewhere in that range of your collection. And this is going to be, as I said, this is all a rule of thumb. None of this is in stone. It's going to be a case by case. Because I've had some libraries coming to me or I've heard of libraries explaining their reading to their community and saying why they're doing it, saying, well, the commission says we have to get rid of everything that's over five years old. The commission says we have to get rid of everything that hasn't circulated in the last three years and there's just books flying off the door. No, no, no. This is all you need to evaluate. You need to look at things. These are some criteria you can use to get started if you're not sure what do I do. They can guide you, but you're going to evaluate things in a case by case basis. And you're going to have things that are 20 years old, 30 years old, classics. As it says here, you're going to want to keep a six-year collection, but you might need a new copy of it because it's been so old, you need a new version. This is how things, yeah. Yep. Then here are some questions that you can ask yourself while you're reading, once again, trying to figure out should I keep it? Should I get rid of it? Would I be embarrassed if the library did not own this item? Once again, right? If you say Treasure Island or some other classic warm piece, I don't know. This is about local interest and the offer and those future questions. A local author, right? That would be embarrassing. Yes. Someone who you know is a local author either in your community or in Nebraska that you know people are asking about or who may show up on nature. That should do, especially if they're living. Of course you would keep their things. You wouldn't just say sorry. It was so old. You look at what fits the needs of the community. If it has local interest, once again, if that author is still living and writing because a lot of people come later to an author and they read it and then they want to go back to the beginning. Yes, everything else they've written. That doesn't mean that you have to keep everybody's ever written. If you have one Daniel Steele, that doesn't mean you have to have every Daniel Steele. Does believe me, someone else has it. Those are a good case for interlover. Yes, you can borrow them. Think about it. If I put this in a nice looking display, would somebody borrow it? I think they might. You just try and then you'll know. If nobody borrows it, okay, now I know. Then you can read that. Some of this reading is going to be a multi-step process. Especially with that putting on display. You're going to create a display of some things you want to try and burn more attention to or you think should have gotten checked out because either you thought it was interesting or you know people were asking about it but they just couldn't find it. They didn't track it down. Put out the displays, see what happens, and the ones that don't, then you've got your second step of, well, I tried. Everyone who I thought might be interested came in and walked by it. Yeah, I've been through here. Then the question I get asked a lot is, what do I not read? What should I always keep? Always is kind of tricky. But on your first pass through, let's say, do not read local history. Beyond repair is really a term you have to look at. Bidries can do a lot of good work. And so local history, one of those things that is never going to be printed again, the book from the 125th year celebration. Nebraska's communities recently had a lot of those. Yeah. 125 years. They were all founded about the same time. So 10 years from now, if they've had a lot of use, they could be in really bad shape. But that's something I'd look at the Bidries for. Historical materials like that you're going to want to hold on to and figure out a way to get them repaired. Because that's people, when they think of library, they do think of archives a lot. Now that doesn't mean that you need to archive everything, but certainly in your community and possibly your county. But local history is something that I would not throw out. As you talked about, Chris, the local authors, especially when they're upright and walking, because you don't know when they're going to show up. Local settings. Now, the book was written about Nebraska, not really real people, but Nebraska's the setting. Now, once again, if they have not circulated in five years, then you really have to think about it. I'm not saying throw it out after five years. I'm saying consider reading it at that point. Genealogy material, that's the same as the local history. All those records of births and deaths and things, those handwritten stuff. You can't get rid of it. You've got to figure out a way to find a spot. Even if it's a closet, tuck it away. Figure out a way to repair it, preserve it. A whole other discussion would be potentially scanning it to make a digital copy just in case beef is going. Something happens. All the pieces at some point. That's a whole other... Yeah, that's a different... Different types of stuff. And then, of course, if you have kept reference works that build on each other, like the quotation books, sometimes they build from one section or one addition to the next addition. And then you still have to look at the condition. So, then here's the really tricky question. Yes. What do you do with all of those books that you have read it? Once again, if you read a little bit each time, each day that you're there or each week, then it's easier. Because you might have two or three things. Maybe one. Things that you want to dispose of. You could keep a stack if you have a library friends group and you have an agreement with them that they're going to have an annual sale or that you provide an ongoing rack sale for them. That's one thing to do with weighted books. You'll definitely want to consider the condition. You don't want your friends trying to sell stuff that's falling apart or that has a big chocolate stain in it or whatever it is. Or coffee spilled on it or the ones that smell so much like smoke that once again people with asthma are in trouble. So, maybe you want to sell them and make a little bit of money back. You can sell them to a used book dealer. Actually, you don't really sell it to them. It's more of a consignment relationship. Better World Books and The Rift Books are two of the biggest ones. So, if you're in a situation where you have quite a few weighted books, you can Google them and find out what their criteria requires. We just box them up, send them to them. They figure out selling them and then you get a percentage of it. So, yeah, that's one way. But they only take certain things that's true. Better World does have some criterias. So, you just have to check into that. You can donate them. Once again, I definitely get rid of the worst books condition-wise. You can donate to a hospital. If you have a large print, you can donate to a care facility. If you have a correctional facility, a one-in-times... They are desperate sometimes to try to sort of take materials. They don't have a lot of budget. And of course, they have to be pretty particular about the stuff that they get as well. But they can decide that. So, you can donate to charity. Now, something you need to think about is there are ethical concerns with donating weeded nonfiction books. Recently, I was helping a library lead and they looked brand new. A book on... I think it was Every Country in the World. I kid you not. They were countries. It was a series. So, there was every country. So, you get to that doing number. It opened it up. It was always the same format. Here's the physical properties of this country. Here's the economics of this country. Here's the population. And each book laid it out the same way. The problem was, they were published in 1980. And I was recently weeding them. So, that's going to be some totally inaccurate... Some of those countries don't even exist anymore. Think of Yugoslavia. It is no longer Yugoslavia. It's all been broken up into these other countries. In 1980, the populations and the economics and everything has changed. So, do you really want to donate that to a homeschool library or maybe even... Anything. Anywhere. Any of these places. If you don't want to... Now, for book sale and book use book dealers, that's different because people buying those... Would be buying them for a reason. Like, I want to know what it did say. I'm doing this for some historical research, but for some place where they're going to just give it to people to read, like the nursing homes and charities and things, don't pass off your old misinformation and inaccurate books on other places, just that you need to get rid of it. Right. So, those are the kind of things you have to watch. And think about it. Is the organization you are giving them to going to want them once they get there? Right. Are they going to use it? Yeah. So, and one really fun thing to do is the altered book crafts. I don't know if you've seen those. I have a lamp. Yeah, I have a lamp that is made out of books. I saw an e-reader cover and it was actually the cover of an old... Oh, that's cool. To make the reader. Yeah. And it looks, it was great. So, that's part of the recycling. So, you could do a program on recycling our old needed books into... Altering them into something art. Into art. Teens love it. I know the commission has a few books about that topic because I've bothered myself and the system offices have professional collections as well and they may have some of those types of books in their programming. But the recycling, straight up recycling paperbacks you can put in the bin. But hardbacks, they cannot recycle that, those hard covers. Right, yeah. And so, we, unless they've changed, we were told that the covers had to be cut off and then the pages could be recycled. Check with whoever does your recycling. Yeah, I would say. But if, and if that's the process, believe me, you, it's not worth it. The time, the time it takes to get them to have taken about it. You know, and I always thought, well, you know, if you had some teenagers that needed to do a community service and I'm thinking, I'm going to give them a knife. No. You know, a box cutter. Yeah. But, and then, you know, there comes a time when they need to go in the dumpster. But when something goes in the dumpster it needs to be unavoidable. I mean, you have to, and you don't, it's better not to just load up the dumpster with books that are not in bags. Discreetly is the term. This is, he's doing it as an on and on going basis. So you don't have, this week when we did the entire library and now our dumpster is full of books, it's going to be a gradual thing. Right. Each week, a few books will be in there and you're going to add more books. Yeah. I mean, and then people will see it as an add. Right. Yes. So you show them give and take. Yes, we get rid of those. But look, we bought these 10 new books and that's why. Right. And this is about the worst condition. These are the things like the mold, the damage. There is no, there's no saving it. Right. So it is, you know, it hurts. It does. It hurts my heart. It's, it's garbage. It's become garbage now because of the damage to it. Right. Yeah. Well, I see we're getting pretty close here. Yeah. It's just 11 o'clock, but that's okay. We started a little after. We will continue our session here until Denise gets through. I think she has to share. It's all being reported for you. Not a problem. So if you do need to leave because you're only a lot of this one hour officially in your schedule to this, that's fine. But we'll finish everything up here and the recording will be available later and you can watch the rest of it that you weren't able to watch live here. We'll brush through anything. We'll get all the information. All the information done and out there in the recording. Thanks. I wanted to talk about our monthly reading. Yeah. That was so much fun. But there are controversies that have come up and you may have heard some of them and this is why people are nervous about reading. I do want to jump into one thing. If you do have any questions about reading, something particular in your library, type it into the question section, get it in there. Even if you have to leave, I'll make sure that we answer it for you so you can come back and see what the answer is later. I'll make sure that you're unable to stick around. So do type in and get your questions in there for us. Okay. All right. Well, and like I say, these kind of things are really hot buttons. And so much so that I have seen them on television news. I've seen them front page newspaper. They can be very hot button controversies. And so that's why people are nervous about it. But if you leave with the crew method, you won't have this. And if you keep your staff informed, if you have somebody on the staff who is really against reading, you need to win them over because they're going to be out in the community saying the same things to the community that they say to you and your staff. Why are we doing this? We shouldn't be throwing away books. All the good books are going in the trash. You know, it's really bad PR. So it's very important to get your staff on board so that they know why and how this is happening, that it's very measured, very considered. It's not just willy-nilly. You have to make sure. And your board is as well. Because if anybody walks up to the library board and says, did you see the dumpster behind the library? And they've been, and they're being blindsided, it's a bad thing. So the one debate that comes up so often is it's a classic. People should read the classics. We need to hang on to them. Where are they going to find them if they're not here? So yes, if they support the curriculum of your local school or if you're a college library, then yes, cheap paper copies of whatever classics or whatever authors. It's a big falter. If everybody has to read one falter, I'm sorry. Falkner was not my favorite. I read a whole bunch of falters. But I never got any better. I'm the same with Hemingway. But they're classics. They're classics. And people really feel like it's our duty as librarians to love them all and expose them to great literature. Unless a movie comes out or the books like The Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or whatever it was. I mean, for a while, the classics were really checking out. Because they read that one because the Zombies somehow said, look at what the original is. So hey, it was a good method of getting people to read them. But if they're itty bitty books as they were in the older days and believe me, I've seen a lot of books from the 1940s since I've been back here in Nebraska. If you open it and the pages are brittle and yellow and the type is the smallest font you have ever seen. No one is going to read that. Even if they're required, even if it's on the list. So go ahead and go to Dover. It's a publisher that does paperback books. Very inexpensive classics. $3 or $4 when you can have a classic replaced. Sam Shaw from here at the commission gave me an idea. He said that if many of your classics are in really bad shape, go ahead and discard them. Then buy an inexpensive e-reader like at Christmastime when the Kindle is on for $39 or $49. Then go to Project Gutenberg, which is a free online database of books that are in the public domain and go ahead and download the titles that you need to fill in your classic collection and then circulate that e-reader. Gutenberg titles are free because they're in the public domain. These classics are in the public domain. They're sold. That's perfect. So Sam gave me that idea. I thought that was a good one. Here is our classic e-reader. Go ahead. Read any classic you want. But it's important that you focus on the positive. As I mentioned, keep the staff informed than if people see and say, oh, where's that book going? That's my favorite book. Well, gee, maybe you can buy it at our next book sale. But make sure that they're keeping it positive that there's not complaints going on about old and yucky stuff. The positive spin is you're making room for new material. The shelves are easier to navigate. You're replacing outdated information. The ultimate goal of meeting is positive. Right. It's a positive thing. And that's where transparency is important. Yeah. To your staff, to your community, to your board, as you mentioned, to any stakeholders. Anybody walk by on the street? Right. Start it with the whole thing. This is a good thing happening. And here's the good stuff. And in my notes, I have transparency is key. That is the word, transparency. And weeding isn't always about reading the shelves of things. Sometimes about getting fresh new titles or fresh new copies of the same thing. Now, I'm going to leave it on this slide for just a little bit and talk about the month of weeding. Yes. This is not an annual issue. It started out as a week of weeding. And we ran it that way for several years. And this year, it just seemed useful to us to focus on it for a whole month. And what we encourage people to do is weeding a section of their library that they've been avoiding. Now, you know what that is. A certain genre that is a favorite of your own that you just didn't want to read anything. We do ask you to just look at it and consider it. And if you do read anything, then let us know. It wasn't about quantity as far as we weren't saying you have to read at least a hundred titles. There was no end. All we ask is that you consider weeding, that you walk to that shelf and give it a little bit of a try. And if you needed some help, over the past about three years, Central Plains Library System has had co-directors, Sharon Osanga and myself, and Sharon did a lot of weeding, especially this last April. And we usually had a little bit of a prize. And I was going to say that last year in April, for our month of weeding, we had 18 public libraries, 18 school libraries, and they weren't the same communities, all different communities, and even an academic library participates, so 37 libraries. And yet, some we did just a few things, and some did that major overhaul because it hadn't been done for 40 years. But we did a rough estimate, and it was about 15,000 items where we did this spring. Now, they always find interesting things. I love the different things that show up. There was a book on a librarian's shelf that she was a schoolgirl in that school, and as she pulled the card out, she realized that she had checked it out in 1960. It was still on the shelf. She went from schoolgirl to librarian, and 1960 is a lot of years that went by. Then, there was a Bible on a shelf, which, oh, that's a struggle. There was a Bible on a shelf, and from the 1940s, and the current librarian realized when they pulled the card that their cousin, who was 80 years old, borrowed that book when he was in high school. In Nebraska, where communities tend to people stay in the same community, there's a lot of that, but it just seems so odd that they kept seeing their own name, or their family's name. The 1989 World Book, that was a good one, and one public librarian was struggling with letting go of so many gently used books that were only checked out one or two times. That's the thing that you have to know. It's going to be a struggle. All of us can easily throw out the ones that are tattered and torn and stained. It seems like a waste to get rid of those books when we battle so hard for money to buy books. Here we are getting rid of them, but if they've been on the shelf 5, 10, 15 or more years, they're taking up space. It's deceiving to people who walk in, because when you are asking for funding for new material, they say, that's plenty of books, what do you need? It's really important to give people a true picture of what your library has. Some of those places like Better World Books and Shrift Books, it's a turnover thing. You're not just getting rid of everything and then you have to figure out where to buy it. You can make some money out of these or with a book sale. I like having an ongoing, sometimes you have your big annual book sale where everything you have has been collected or people have donated books to help raise money for the library. Some places have just a single shelf extra book cart set aside for ongoing. There's always a few books there that somebody could buy, and that's a little bit here and there. A year ago, we just had, in 2016, we had a week of reading. We had quite a few people participate, but we had a big blizzard that winter. We did have to extend it and they found so many things that are the Hardy Boys Mysteries. Now that's something, if you have the old version of the Hardy Boys Mysteries, those hardback books, the outdated picture on the front, they're not going to check out those books. Teenagers and preteens do not take those home. There are now, some new Hardy Boys. They've updated the covers and everything so that they are more attractive. And there's still nice books, good stories to read, without any concern for parents that there might be topics they're not interested in. So you can do that. There was one that was taken out called in 1962. It was weeded in 2016. That was hooked on phonics from the 1980s. That was a big program. And the Amy Vanderbilt Complete book is etiquette. So, some interesting things. You run across all kinds of interesting things as you're doing that reading. Some of these old ones I was thinking about, and this may be, I think I did a session about this previously. I was just thinking about the Hardy, the old original Hardy Boys books. There are some people who are collectors that would pay rather than just better books or thrift stores or something. That may pay more money because they're collectable items. That's right, a specific edition of something. I know we did do a session about that. But that's something else to look into when you're getting rid of some of the books that are old, but still in good shape. You might be able to sell them on eBay or Amazon, you can sell things as a marketplace as a seller yourself and get a little bit more money. Here's a 50 cent book we're putting out on the book sale. Look into that definitely. You might be able to sell things like that because collectors will research a little, will pay you a little bit more for some of these titles that they are hard to find that you may have had in your collection for 40 years. They're still not moving. They're in great shape and a collector is going to just go crazy for that. Even with the library markings and the pocket and card, sometimes that can add to the appeal, but the card is from a long time ago. You can tell. I actually have a jigsaw puzzle, a big one, and all of it is covers of Nancy Drew books. It's the covers of the old ones. That was fun. You're right, collectors do that kind of stuff. Everybody has their Achilles heel. Things that are very difficult to weed. Mine is cookbooks. I have to agree. I acknowledge that. My husband hates it. I bring them home. I just can't send those off. But art books in the 700s, that's really hard to get rid of those. In public libraries in central Nebraska, it's the crafts, the knitting, the crochet patterns. But when you look at it, and it's all 1,000 things you can make with toilet paper tubes, it's kind of over with. People don't want to see that anymore. But as we talked about, the whole point is to provide your patrons with better service and access to everything that they are interested in. Make sure to streamline your collection for efficiency. And making it better for your community to use the library. Because that's what we want is for them to come in and use the library. We want to be relevant. We want to be current. We do not want to be just a museum of old dusty books. Or warehouse. And if you have any questions and didn't have the chance to send them in, you can go to the Central Plains Library System webpage. And you can send me an email or call me on my Nebraska only 800 number. And I'll be glad to answer what I came. Alright. Nobody has any desperate questions. This is great information. We haven't done a bleeding session in a few years on the show. I love the special program. The week of bleeding, turn it into a month of bleeding is a great thing to encourage people to just get on board with it and do it. So that might be something you can do at your library. Focus time for an order. For an email list and on our webpage. And what we do hear from people is thanks for giving me the nudge. I appreciate the reader. We give away a prize like an e-reader or two e-readers during the month of bleeding. But it's not necessarily about the prize. I mean they're thrilled to get it if they do. But it's just the push and feeling of community that, hey, there's a lot of people in some Nebraska that are waiting right now. I'll be one of them. And you can discuss with other librarians about what they're doing. Reach out to your neighbor communities. What do you think of this book? You have a copy of it? Alright. Like I said, nobody had any desperate questions. That's fine. There it goes. Switch over to... I guess I've got... Switch to... There we go. Alright. So that will wrap it up for today's show. And I'm going to show you now where this will be on our website. This is the Nebraska Library Commission's website. Under our education section, Encompass Live webcasts, you can search our site for Encompass Live, but you can also just Google us from your search engine of choice. And so far in the world, like he says every week, someday it's going to change. We're the only thing called Encompass Live. So anything you use to search for it, you will find our website. And it will go to... where we'll have our upcoming shows, but our archives, I want to show you this right here. And this is where last week's show is the top of this page here. Today's we posted here, the top of the most recent ones. We'll have a link to the recording of the Parliament presentation and it is here, we have last time, any of the URLs, the crew manual link to the Better World books, the other things we mentioned, that those were publishing. We'll make just a link so you can quickly get to all these resources. Anyone who attended Live today or registered for the show will be getting an e-mail sent to you to let you know when the recording is available. It is all of our recordings, as I said, are free and open to anyone to watch. So it'll also be posted out to our various social media and mailing lists as well. But you guys will all get a direct message sent to you for that. Most likely it'll be done by the end of the day today. As long as YouTube cooperates with processing and posting everything, I'll have a message out to you later today. So I hope you join us, so that'll wrap it up for the day show. I hope you join us for next week, where we just added this to the schedule. It was a last minute thing we were working on. The Talking Books Helping Patrons over at Nebraska, here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we have the Talking Book and Braille Service as part of our departments here. They're talking about the Braille Service services all across the country. But Scott Schultz, who is the director of our TVBS department, is going to talk to us about what they're doing there, what's available, and the new things that you can get. Everything's going digitally in their area, which is awesome. And some accessibility and access issues that libraries and people just with any sort of really related disabilities have to be aware of and how libraries can help with this. So join us for our next week's show on Talking Books and any of our other shows that we have coming up. You'll notice the week after that, make sure you're aware of that. We do not have a show. Every once a year, our Nebraska Library Association and School Librarians Association annual conference. That is the one week of the year that we do not have and help us live. So we are here 51 weeks out of the year. Everybody's busy heading off to conference, so we don't do it that week. So we'll be off that one week. If you are here in Nebraska, join us for the conference out in Carney. You can get, I'm going to link here to the program and the schedule. And then after that, we've got our other October and November dates are getting added. I'm here to see more and more topics coming up. So please do register for anything you see coming up. And Compass Live is also on Facebook. So if you are a big Facebook user, give us a like over there. I give notifications about what you're reminded along in for today's show. Post when the recordings are available from previous sessions are all put on here. So we'll update this page a couple of times a week. So please, if you are big on Facebook and want to track what we're doing there and be notified like our Facebook page. Other than that, that wraps it up for today's show. Thank you very much everyone for tuning in. Thank you Denise for coming over here to join us this morning. And we'll see you next time on Compass Live. Bye. Bye.