Brandy Danner is a librarian specializing in young adult services.
Updates galore
The weeding project is finished, with about a third of the collection purged. I learned several things from the experience: first, that weeding fiction is far easier than non-fiction; second, it’s a lot more work than you’d expect; and third, even the shelf-sitters circulate better than they’re not jammed in with other books.
The YA Non-fiction collection is a strange mix of useful and not useful, things we can’t throw away and things we wouldn’t want to. I did move a couple of poetry novels (like Keesha’s House) into the fiction collection, where nearly everyone else in the state has them. (Actually, I left one copy in the non-fiction, moved one to fiction, and one to storage.) I tossed a teen etiquette guide that contained a long section on how to behave at formal dinners—not wedding-formal, mind you, but things like dining with high-ranking politicians and royals. This library is in an upper-class neighborhood, but it’s not that upper class.
Where I really ran into problems, though, was weeding the collection of mental health and sexuality books. Sure, most of the books about depression, STDs, pregnancy, and the like haven’t been checked out in years. But they’re mixed into celebrity biographies, psychology, writing, college guides… I’m guessing that the books are getting a lot of in-house use, but the teens who are using them don’t want to bring them home. Which is understandable. I still threw away the more dated books—the ones talking about Sue and John necking and petting, puberty books that still mention belts, those sorts of things—and kept anything that looked like it would still be useful. I’ve ordered some new books on teen depression, manners, and sexuality, and when those come in, I’ll ditch some of the older books that still sit there.
As for the shelf-sitters: there were some books that only just barely squeaked into the “saved” category and returned to the shelf. And since then, those titles (some of them, anyway) have gone out a few more times, a definite uptick in their popularity. My only thought is that suddenly people can see them, and therefore want them. Also, people take a bunch of shelf-sitters every time I do some shifting, so there’s that at work, too. I guess they just look newer than they really are.
In other news, my circulation numbers sank for September, as compared with their growth over the past eight months or so. This doesn’t really surprise me, as school started, summer reading ended, and everyone has a little less time to spend on pleasure-reading. Children’s non-fiction circulation rose as school has gotten underway, so it’s not like all the patrons have just vanished.
The thousand dollars in Friends’ money has been spent (or at least mostly): in addition to the $330 I spent at SPX, the other $670 worth of orders was submitted downtown last week. I have another $400 in orders just sitting in the back, and that’s where I have some new non-fiction (Yoga! Puberty! Mental health! Memoir!), new hardcover fiction, paperback series, and the like. I’ll send that along in the next couple of weeks (can’t submit too much at once, or they get a little freaky on me, even if it is from different funds), and that will be officially submitted a few weeks after that.
At least three of the books I sent downtown for processing after SPX—Owly, Bone Sharps, and King—are now in the system from other libraries. Our cataloging department hasn’t returned them yet, but at least those titles should go a little faster now. I sort of with I’d held onto them to do them myself… but how was I to know? (And Bone Sharps already has a hold on it, though not through my library. Who knows when we’ll get our copy back.)
I think that’s everything. If I missed something and you’re dying to know how it turned out, drop an email and remind me! I'll put it in my next update.
