This is forwarded from a colleague who worked with the World Library Partnership in Africa. Frieda Rosenberg, UNC-Chapel Hill Jonathon, For the last 8 years I've lived in South Africa or Zimbabwe, working for a small NGO helping folks build and run libraries. I really truly understand your dilemma. In libraries that have so few books and often little or no money to purchase new materials it is often painful to get folks to allow you to discard weeded books. Here's what I suggest: 1. always take a look at your collection development policy or, if you don't have one, look at your mission statement.Consider who users your library and for what purposes. Each book you have in your library should be there because it fits your mission and because it serves your user population. 2. I do truly believe that people can be turned off by a library filled with too many useless books. In a new library near the border with Botswana I attended a very exciting workshop for teachers wanting to start a library in their area or school. After the workshop we were all going to get a first look at a new library next door, about to open to the public. We excitedly entered the door but we were hit by the musky and moldy smell of old books. Undeterred I followed a group of new friends as they looked at the collection. They were pulling out books, written between 1900-1960's and published in the US, the UK, Canada and so on. Many were in the languages other than English. Not a single one was in local languages like Shona and Ndbele. There were books on microwave cooking, how to learn to ski, the 1902 dress codes for coeds at the University of Pittsburgh and my favorite, a 5 volume listing of physicians approved by a medical insurer in Connecticut. Now all of these may be of interest to some library somewhere but they were of no interest to folks living in Donkwe Donkwe, Francistown or Nyanga! As we continued through the library the group started to exclaim, "these put me off, they really put me off." After we left I talked to the group I toured with - their enthusiasm for building libraries had left them. It seemed the same old thing- they heard about the promises of interesting and useful books that would appeal to their communities, lead young people to read but the reality was a library full of things that would turn off most prospective users. True, out of the thousands of books there were some real gems: interesting books, books with good information in them, stuff I've seen in the hands of people in other southern African libraries. I imagine a much better scenario if the staff of the new library had been able to weed out the useless books, the moldy books and so on. It is much better to have a collection with just 200 good, interesting books that fit your collection development plan than to have thousands of books that your users have to spend hours searching through to find the those 200 good books. In fact, I believe it is your duty to weed and discard those useless books. Keeping books that should be discarded has several bad effects: 1. Affect on users: it turns off people trying to find something useful 2. Economics: people see such a lot of books in your library, many of them totally useless. When government officials or other funders are asked for money for your library they see you have such a big collection, why give you more money when other places need water treatment, medicine, plumbing? 3. Economics: it costs a lot more money to keep up those thousands of books, it takes so much more labor hours of the library staff to process them and keep them up. What to do with the weeded books and magazines: 1. store them (someone already suggested this but be careful- storage conditions can lead to bugs, bats, rodents making a home, can go moldy and musty) 2. have a sale - sell those books and journals, many people will buy them 3. donate or sell them to local schools who can: a. cut out useful passages, use them as reading cards- success breeds success, allows kids to successfully read a reading card instead of feeling bad because they've failed to read a whole book. b. cut pictures - teachers can use these as prompts to get kids to write about what they see happening in the picture - good for kids from 1st grade on up c. use the pages to create papier mache masks d. use the pages of books and non-glossy magazines in a technology class to make new paper (boil only non-glossy pages into a mush, stretch out mesh vegetable bags, pour mush over the bag, set outside in the sun to drip off the excess water and when it dries it is paper. It is best to use this paper for art or wrapping packages, it is usually too lumpy to write on. Cut out pieces of old tin, shape into picture frames, cover the frames with this paper and sell them. 4. have a big community recycle campaign: ask for help from paper pulping companies and NGOs or universities to help you create a recycle paper drive. See http://www.tve.org/ho/doc.cfm?aid=1452&lang=English - what is happening in Mutare. Link this up with local schools for technology classes, info about getting jobs in the industry etc. Have a big fair and donate the weeded books to the project. You might even win some funding from the paper mill folks. My ideas will help small libraries through medium sized libraries, but perhaps not be as helpful in University libraries. But big libraries really need to look seriously at weeding and discarding as well. I'm doing my masters thesis on this topic. If you need any more ideas or help let me know. I loved living in your country and working with Zimbabweans. I'd be back there in a second if I could afford it. I wish you luck. Yours, Maggie Hite -- Maggie Hite Catalog Department Academic Affairs Libraries CB# 3914 Davis Library University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill maghite@email.unc.edu 919-962-1128
