Kirk introduces her article with how much she hates reference. That statement automatically hooked me as I wanted to find out why. She than went on to say "what I hate about reference is that it seems to be a big waste of money. Today, with everything that we need available on our cell phones, a book that can't be checked out of the library is ludicrous" (p. 28). Yes, I can see her point. I new set of World Book Encyclopedias is priced at $1,044.00. Most schools in our district have access to WorldBookOnline now. The benefits of this being, it is accessible from home, it is continuously updated, it is available to unlimited users at a time and it does not take up space in the library. Which is the better deal?
The rest of Kirk's article discusses how she decided on what parts of her reference collection "lived" and which ones "died". Her regular weeding practices go by the acronym: MUSTY
M-misleading information
U-ugly, worn copies
S-superseded by another
T-trivial
Y-your collection has no use for the materials
Even though these guidelines have helped her in the past and did play some role in this latest weed, she said in terms of reference she had to go by some different guidelines which she made up as she went along.
The Big Weed:
- She removed most of the books with information containing statistics, as they can easily be found online.
- Books of maps were also removed, because they were so easily outdated and again, could easily be found online. I don't know if I would removed atlases, unless they were extremely outdated because as a classroom teacher, they are good hands on resources to have in order to teach longitude and latitude.
- She rid the library of dictionaries as well, with the exception of the unabridged dictionary and the foriegn language dictionaries. Her reasoning being that all the students in her school had recived MacBooks which included dictionarys. Not many schools are so fourtunate, so many dictionary collections would most likely remain in schools.
- Technical books were removed as they were outdated
- Art books were weeded with the criteria of "if the pictures, drawings or photographs were in black and white and the originals were colour, [she] got rid of them" (p. 28).
- Kirk also went by the guideline, if teachers had not used the materials, she got rid of them. An example being, a complete set of critical analysis of American and British literature.
- The history section was weeded according to the curriculum, as well as, by her MUSTY guidelines. This was the hardest section for her to weed as she confessed her love for history, but in the end weeded with her head instead of with her heart. I think because of this, and my love for books, weeding would be a difficult task for me.
The Survivors:
- Two sets of encyclopedias
- Specialty dictionaries
- Two books of quotations
- One set of decades books
- One fourth of the original reference section was placed in circulation
After the weed Kirk describes the library that is "cleaner and neater...and the books that are left are ones that will be used by the students" (p. 28). And best of all? She can now spend money to update the reference collection with a better understanding of what materials will get used.
Overall I enjoyed Kirk's article as it is a realistic situation that Teacher-librarians are being faced with today. No longer do our reference sections have to be so large because of the compact nature of online reference materials, which are automatically and continually updating and are available from any computer with an internet connection.
Works Cited:
Kirk, Terri. "Tough Love for Your Reference Collection." Library Media Connection 29.2 (2010): 28. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts. EBSCO. Web. 16 May 2011.
"The World Book Encyclopedia 2011" World Book Online. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 May 2011. <http://www.worldbook.com/all_products/the_world_book_encyclopedia_2011/flypage.tpl.html>.
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