Cori Wilhelm: Alright. Thank you everyone for joining us. For the latest installation of the spotlight on suny libraries. And this month we're doing things a little differently. We're hosting a panel representing 4 different Sunni Campuses. To discuss weeding
Cori Wilhelm: which is a very nice spring topic, and, as you can see on Angela's sites. We've got some weeds coming up with our flowers already.
Cori Wilhelm: Each campus will present, and then we'll have time for open questions and discussion. But if you have questions during the presentations, please throw them in the chat. So I'll introduce each panelists right before they speak. So first, we have Angela Rhodes, who is the intern director and the systems and electronic resources librarian at Suny, Morrisville, and you can take it away. Angela.
Angela Rhodes she/her: Alright. Thank you. So Hello, everybody my name is Angela Rhodes. Pronouns she her I am currently serving as the interim director of libraries at Suny Morrisville.
Angela Rhodes she/her: What I'm going to do is take you through some very specific parts and pieces of our weeding project. So over the summer of 2023 we completed a large scale weeding project, where we we did approximately 30,000 titles from our 90,000 title collection. And then my again, my, my presentation is gonna focus on project management and communication.
Angela Rhodes she/her: So in terms of
Angela Rhodes she/her: like, I think ha! Why our project was so successful. I think a lot of it came down to our ability to have good project management, and that provided us with a clear context and justification. So in the spring of 23, I was taking the Suny Cpd library leadership and management certificate program
Angela Rhodes she/her: and specifically doing the project management class, and I used this weeding project for my class work. So that's kind of what gave me the impetus to actually go through the motions of doing a full, a full project management.
Angela Rhodes she/her: I don't know like
Angela Rhodes she/her: thing, I guess. So I created a charter and a scope that laid out the the vision, the risks, the stakeholders, the deliverables and the cost estimates, and the vision provided the context and justification in our communication, and how we answered the questions of the why, you know, why are you doing this
Angela Rhodes she/her: so? The why was very simple. We needed to assess the library's physical collection at the morsel campus for value and need based on the collection development policy and make decisions on materials that can be weeded and then to weed and shift the libraries collection in preparation for renovation and in in defined sections.
Angela Rhodes she/her: So that was really kind of like our 2 big things was to assess the physical collection. Because it hadn't been done in a really long time. To make some decisions about the collection. Based on some upcoming. You know things that were coming down the pike. Essentially, we were slated for renovation. And we needed to really think about okay, what's worth saving when we have to pack everything up and get out of here and store it somewhere.
Angela Rhodes she/her: So
Angela Rhodes she/her: I think one of the big things that we focused on was creating a target. We aimed for a target. So our within our project documentation, we aimed for
Angela Rhodes she/her: using our vision and our collection development policy to help set our target.
Angela Rhodes she/her: And then so in our case, roughly, one third of our collection was comprised of literature, a subject for which we have no attached programs or majors. And so this section alone saw roughly half of all the titles that were weeded. And what we did was we used our policy for collection development, which is, of course, based on our mission and vision of the library
Angela Rhodes she/her: to weed our collection. So the same guide, and to quote from our collection development policy. You know, the same guidelines used for selection of library materials provide the underlying principles for deselection.
Angela Rhodes she/her: And so we had a set target number or linear feet to weed in order to sort to sort of shrink our footprint.
Angela Rhodes she/her: So then we added a scope to weed objectively, so within that instead of going title by title, and saying, Oh, do we really need this? It was more. We examined our whole collection, so our whole collection, under several different lenses and criteria to decide what to weed. So we started with the entire collection, and the scopes that, we added were making sure that it was not the last copy in Suny
Angela Rhodes she/her: to make sure that it was not part of our special collections that it had not circulated in 13 years, and that it was not a part of our core subject areas.
Angela Rhodes she/her: And then finally, we added a scope of nothing older than 1,900 because we didn't have the capacity to do any like large scale assessment of of anything that was older, for, you know, value, rarity, anything like that. And then, obviously, just as a baseline. We started as nothing newer than 1990.
Angela Rhodes she/her: And so those were what we started with as our baselines for our our target and the scopes that we applied to our and the entirety of our collection, in order to sort of set the stage for what was going to be weeded from our collection.
Angela Rhodes she/her: and then finally
Angela Rhodes she/her: communicate and listen early and often. So we started by sharing our vision target and scope with the stakeholders. Number one stakeholders were our library faculty and staff. So
Angela Rhodes she/her: we used, as I mentioned earlier, we used our vision in context, in our communication. And so we communicated with first
Angela Rhodes she/her: Librarians. So we knew what was coming right. We had our facilities and project manager walk into the library in February 23, and said, You're going under renovation in 2 years.
Angela Rhodes she/her: and so from that we had to talk very seriously about what our collection was going to look like in a renovated building. Especially considering the fact that we knew that other programs were going to be moving in and the the collection had to shrink.
Angela Rhodes she/her: So then, once we had that we had the librarians and the staff on board agreeing on the vision, the target and the scope before we move it forward. So then we brought in the provosts, the Dean and the faculty. So we sent out emails. We sent out several messages, saying.
Angela Rhodes she/her: You know, this is why this is the why. Here's our vision and our context for our weed.
Angela Rhodes she/her: Here's the things you know. When we communicated to our stakeholders, we communicated, you know, what would be weeded, what would not be weeded? We so we gave them our our scope. We gave them our parameters for weeding.
Angela Rhodes she/her: so
Angela Rhodes she/her: From there we shared. the literal list of of everything that was going to be weeded! So we shared. We shared very freely with
Angela Rhodes she/her: pretty much the entire campus, what would be, what would be? We did and allowed them the opportunity to communicate with us what needed to be kept from what we had initially selected for withdrawal. Obviously, we did set boundaries on, you know what could be kept, you know we told our faculty. You can't just say everything. But you know, essentially, we allowed our our stakeholders to say, no, this really needs to be kept, but allowed ourselves the ability to make that final decision.
Angela Rhodes she/her: So and then we also communicated a lot with other Sunnis that were also going under weeding projects and with Olis for protocol and lists.
Angela Rhodes she/her: So. You know, thanks to Michelle Eichelberger, we got the last copy in Suny lists. You know a full title list that we could run against ours to say which one of our titles was a last copy in Sunni. We communicated with Olis to talk about. You know the state parameters around the discarding of State property? Whether or not we have to recycle rules about. Can people go dumpster diving? The answer by State law is no
Angela Rhodes she/her: so there were things like that that you know, by by communicating early and often with our stakeholders. And then also with others that had gone through these projects we were kind of able to
Angela Rhodes she/her: this. This project went off fairly smoothly, so it all happened in the summer of 23, meaning when, when everything got discarded, we did our communication and lead up in that spring following
Angela Rhodes she/her: or spring previously and we had very little pushback. We had very little pushback from the faculty by communicating our vision and communicating the context for our weed. There the faculty staff and administration were understanding. They said, okay, that makes perfect sense. And and we had very, you know. Of course, you're gonna have those people that are like, oh, the poor books, you know.
Angela Rhodes she/her: Yes, we had some of those people, but we had very little pushback otherwise, and we completed. We fully completed a project that I anticipated taking us 2 years 2 summers in one summer. So over over
Angela Rhodes she/her: summer, 2023, we successfully weeded 30,000 books, roughly, 17,000 of those were literature. Because it's one of those subject areas that you just feel like you can't discard until you're like, why are we holding onto this
Angela Rhodes she/her: so in closing? What I and again, I didn't wanna take up too much time with slides, and I really wanna would rather do. QA. But the the real, the I think the real success of our project came down to good project management and then communicating early and often. And so that's that's really I think what I wanted to focus on in terms of
Angela Rhodes she/her: our successful weeding project, and I will let others take it away for other context. Or if I, if I need to answer questions.
Cori Wilhelm: That was great. Angela and thinking back of my own meeting in my previous role, man
Cori Wilhelm: communicating early and often would have would have helped save a lot of headaches.
Cori Wilhelm: So next we're going to hear from Elena Neuth, who is head of collection management at Suny Genesio.
Cori Wilhelm: And again you can throw questions in the chat, but we'll have time at the end for open discussion and questions with the whole group.
Alana Nuth: I'm sorry. I just have to give zoom permissions. Give me 1 s. I'm sorry.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, no. Problem.
Alana Nuth: I should have
Alana Nuth: Corey. Would you mind sharing my slides for me?
Cori Wilhelm: No problem.
Alana Nuth: I'm so sorry I've used zoom in the past, so I didn't check the sharing because I assumed it would work. And now it won't take my password, and.
Cori Wilhelm: Yes. Well, let me just.
Cori Wilhelm: and I'll.
Alana Nuth: Keep trying in the meantime.
Cori Wilhelm: Yes. Are you able to see that
Cori Wilhelm: one.
Alana Nuth: Okay. And you know what?
Alana Nuth: Okay, thank you, Corey. I'm so sorry.
Cori Wilhelm: No problem, no problem.
Alana Nuth: So. I'm admiring Angela's weed. And you're so clearly thought out project management and communication, because I feel like our weed at Suny. Genacio was like the complete opposite. So I'm so glad that Angela started and set such a good stage. And then it's gonna be such a contrast for us. So I'm gonna be describing our weed. That took place in the spring and summer of 2020. So it took place during Covid
Alana Nuth: and our weed was the result of an unplanned building, renovation and building closure. So in January of 2020 some of our cleaners found asbestos in our library, and the campus ultimately decided to close for health and safety reasons.
Alana Nuth: Ultimately we were. We were the library was moved to a temporary space while our building was abated of asbestos and then underwent a renovation. So now we're scheduled to reopen next academic year.
Alana Nuth: And so it wasn't planned. And so I can't describe all this great project management, or all this great communication that happened because it really didn't. We had a weed.
Alana Nuth: There's some aspects of our we that are going to be different, probably than any weeds that are happening currently. So for example, we couldn't interact with our collection. So when we were making decisions, it was based primarily on data that we could extract from a system we couldn't ever look at a physical material and verify if what the catalog record said, if that you know, match what was on
Alana Nuth: the physical item? We also used all of data because we were weeding pretty early in 2020. We had only been live with Alma for like 6 to 9 months, and so we relied on all of data because we felt like that was giving us a more accurate and complete data set as opposed to trying to compare all of data with Alma data we just opted to not use our Alma data.
Alana Nuth: Okay, Corey, would you mind? Scrolling? Thank you. So for our weed. We started with 250 1,000 volumes, and we were went down to 100,000 volumes. So it was a really significant weed. We had to negotiate with our campus to find space to store our collection. And so there was a lot of negotiation in terms of the space that the campus could offer us, and how much space we really felt like we needed for our collection.
Alana Nuth: So we started with the idea, that any book would not be kept right. So we so anytime I've we did a collection. You always assume that you're keeping everything right. That's the default. You're going to keep it unless it meets meets your weeding criteria for this weed. We flipped it. We assume that any book was going to be discarded unless it met one of the criteria on this bulleted list here.
Alana Nuth: And so that helped us be more aggressive in this we than maybe if we had thought about it differently. So we kept a book if it had been purchased in the last 5 years.
Alana Nuth: if it had local or regional value. So in our case. And I'm sure this is cases for many of your libraries. We have, like a second or third copy of some materials from our special collections in our circulating collection, like, if it's a book. So we can have one copy that circulates, and then one copy that we keep for archival reasons. So we wanted to keep those second and third circulating copies. So we. So we kept those.
Alana Nuth: We also kept books with few holdings and Sunni libraries, so if we were the only holder or if there was only a small number in the system, we for the most part kept our books.
Alana Nuth: there was a few cases where the book was just so out of scope for us, and we really did not
Alana Nuth: imagine that another Sunny would need it, that we did let it go
Alana Nuth: and then we kept for books with circulation history. But we use a sliding scale
Alana Nuth: by subject area, so like in the sciences, whether it was the natural or the social sciences. We focus on books that had more recent circulation versus like the humanities and also mathematics. We were much willing, more willing to keep a book that it circulated. 10 years ago, or 8 or 9 years ago, because we felt like those books. Have more lasting value. And then we also retain several series and a collection of music scores. Based on Fe feedback that we received from our faculty.
Alana Nuth: Alright, Corey, would you mind advancing? Thank you. So the data that we used? I mentioned that we used all of data. And so our digital resources and systems librarian had extracted.
Alana Nuth: all of the olive, all of our olive circulation data before the migration, Alma. So, thank goodness, we had all that data on hand, and then our digital resources and systems. Librarian Bill Jones created like a whole custom dashboard. He imported all that data into this dashboard, and then I could sort it by
Alana Nuth: year and by call number, and then I could export reports into excel. So that was super handy, as opposed to having to like, just manage massive spreadsheets, which is always what I've done in the past. When I've we did. I had this really nice dashboard that Bill Jones made. So that's what we use for our circulation data. We had records for our purchasing history, what we which we used
Alana Nuth: for the holdings. Analysis.
Alana Nuth: again, this is back in 2020. So we didn't have such a nice workflow like Angelo. You were describing sounds so much better than what we did. We ended up, just sending all of our Ocl. Numbers to Shannon Shan pretty, and then he did like a comparison to determine which of those Oclc numbers matched other Sunni holding. So it wasn't as an exact system, and I'm
Alana Nuth: maybe not as clean and then I also ended up doing a lot of keyword searching in the catalog just based on certain words or phrases that would be likely to match any kind of local, regional, or college history. To make sure that we retained those vale those volumes.
Alana Nuth: Alright, Corey, would you mind?
Alana Nuth: Thank you. So there's a several slides here. We can actually skip through these Corey until the next one that has text on it. So these are screenshots from the dashboard the Bill Jones made. I'm happy to talk about it, but I wanna kind of keep moving on on the presentation. We can always look at this later, or when the slides are shared, you can look at it. Them. Thank you.
Alana Nuth: So I also wanted to talk a bit about communication. So Angela did such a great job talking about frequent and upfront con communication with her faculty. We did not have that luxury. So once again we were operating under Covid and we were operating under a
Alana Nuth: unplanned weed, unplanned renovation. So all of our communication took place either over email or virtually, you know, an ideal world I would have liked to meet in person and had more lead up to what was going on. But it being what it was, that's what we did.
Alana Nuth: We ended up creating a separate or unique view and primo of only the titles we plan to weed. So I sent Maggie Mcgee a list of our Mms. Ids for the books that we were going to weed our weeding candidates, and then she used a normalization rule to capture them in the separate primo view.
Alana Nuth: So when it came came time to send emails to faculty. I gave them a link to this primo view so they could see what we plan to weed. And then I also gave them a link to a Google sheet which had all the books we plan to retain. So if they so chose, they could compare between
Alana Nuth: books. We wanted to retain books we wanted to weed, and then we enable the purchase request function in Alma, so that way. In that separate premo view. In that unique view. If a faculty faculty member wanted to ask us to retain a book, they would click. Basically, it was the purchase request button. But what it did was it put the book and they requesters information in a queue which I could then export out of Alma, and then a reconcile with our weeding list to make sure we didn't weed those materials.
Alana Nuth: and my final slide is just a screenshot from that primo view. This is some of the communication that went out. It went out via email, and then I also embedded it in the homepage for Primo. Right now those books are gone. So if we conducted a search in this primo view, there's actually nothing there. But during the time, if you conducted a search you would see the volume, the titles and those that purchase request option. So I'm happy to answer questions during the QA. And thank you.
Cori Wilhelm: Thank you. That was, although you said disorganized. And so I I think that's amazing. The dashboards and the primo view. I love that I wish I had done that when I
Cori Wilhelm: did a weeding project back in back in the day. You do have a question from Susan.
Alana Nuth: Yes.
Cori Wilhelm: How many books were kept based on faculty requests.
Alana Nuth: Oh, Susan, it wasn't that many like I'm sorry I didn't look that up before this presentation. It really wasn't that many, so I think
Alana Nuth: for better or for worse, because this all happened during Covid and the campus all knew what was happening to our building, that the asbestos, that the closure like it was. I don't wanna say it was crisis mode, because I think that's being a little dramatic. But it wasn't normal business, and I think, had it been, we would have received a lot more
Alana Nuth: questions, requests to retain materials. But we really, I mean, I don't like I'm going by memory and not looking at my notes, but I don't think it was more than like 100 books, and it was primarily from our history department like we just didn't get that much pushback also, but when we communicated was during the month of May, so it was like the perfect cluster, like the worst time of the year to be asking faculty to be paying attention. So that was also
Alana Nuth: part of the mix is that we gave them like
Alana Nuth: because of the circumstances. We only gave them like 30 days to let us know what we needed.
Alana Nuth: and I think there was faculty that probably would have liked us to keep materials, but they just didn't have the opportunity to just take the time.
Alana Nuth: Yes. Thank you. Okay.
Cori Wilhelm: Might have been a blessing in disguise.
Alana Nuth: And you know yes, maybe.
Cori Wilhelm: Alright. Next we're gonna hear from Suny Courtland, and we have Jennifer Parker, discovery services librarian and Sue Sliven, technical services librarian to share.
sue.slivan: Alright, Jen, you're up.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Actually, you have the first couple of slides, too.
sue.slivan: Eric.
sue.slivan: So we're gonna talk about assessment as a waiting tool and some of the criteria that you all touched on and kind of how we managed it in order to
sue.slivan: share it with our librarians and others.
sue.slivan: So primarily, we've got some
sue.slivan: live items here. You can see this one is stuff growing on it. So we started off with usage, of course, lack thereof. Looking at analytics. I have a book report that I
sue.slivan: put together a dashboard that
sue.slivan: it's pretty customizable. You could just run a section and say, Show me everything that's in a in the main collection that's active.
sue.slivan: And show me everything. It has 0 loans. I also added a couple of links, especially for our periodicals. I should should have started by saying we had numerous areas that we were waiting in when I started here last January. There was the middle of a waiting project in the teaching material center.
sue.slivan: And then we did. We're we're reading some periodicals out of our main collection that had gotten mixed in. And we also had to weed through our bound periodicals, and we're in the process of looking at our microform. We did some micro cards, and now we're going to go through the film as well. So there's a variety of things going on.
sue.slivan: Things that were obviously not current or had questionable material, or were trash like this one? We're no brainers.
sue.slivan: the additional pass. Yeah, we didn't want to reshell things. So the Tmc
sue.slivan: there was an initial poll list.
sue.slivan: and then the Tmc. Library would look at them
sue.slivan: and quickly say yes or no, but generally everything that got pulled. We wanted 75% of it to not go back on the shelf.
sue.slivan: and then a lot of ick.
sue.slivan: So the criteria that we wanted to initially go through. I just use excel
sue.slivan: and
sue.slivan: pull the entire list.
sue.slivan: couple of columns that, I added, I wanted some data to be retrieved. So my World cat
sue.slivan: link here just does a search by the Oclc. Number and worldcat, and then you can easily click on it. And then
sue.slivan: I had assistant librarians or clerks fill in. How many other libraries
sue.slivan: had that holding, and clearly, if it was substantial, then it was something that we were comfortable
sue.slivan: sending away.
sue.slivan: I use the rules to determine
sue.slivan: what was the last loan date our criteria was, was it used in the past 10 years? And how many times so if it had
sue.slivan: 10 or more uses in the past 10 years, I added a helper column over on the right there. Yes, no. And then
sue.slivan: How many? So that would do a sum for me.
sue.slivan: I also had
sue.slivan: then look for the periodicals to see if we had the title
sue.slivan: electronically. And if we did, to put in the holding, so that while we were standing in front of the stacks I used the pivot chart that I created from this to print out slips using mail merge.
sue.slivan: So we? It was just so hard to look at the data and make determinations like, let's let's just go look. So we took our slips with our target things. Yes, we're targeting this to have
sue.slivan: It's got fewer than 10 loans. It hasn't gone out since 2014.
sue.slivan: Our suggestion is that we're gonna pull it, and then we took the slips and went up into the bound periodicals, and actually put the slips within there to see if what we had was what we thought we had, and we found some partial run, some dead runs missing volumes, things like that. So actually looking at it was really helpful. I concatinated these fields, but you could also use text join, which is a little less messy.
sue.slivan: and that rendered a pivot chart, which gave kind of a concise.
sue.slivan: manageable list that people could look at. So we could say, Yeah, academic therapy at 8 loans. It's got 22 volumes, and we found some of those weren't right. Maximum. The last loan was 2016.
sue.slivan: Some things that were borderline, or we knew we're popular with programs. We would consult with the liaison librarians. But generally we sent this list out and say, Hey, this is what we're looking at. Pulling.
sue.slivan: Review this, tell us if you have any objections. There were very few of them.
sue.slivan: and then
sue.slivan: I think that's pretty much.
sue.slivan: I don't think there's anything else there. Jen's gonna talk about the planning anything I forgot.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay, and I'll probably touch on some of the same things. I know it's really common for big weeding projects to happen. That was certainly the culture here during the summer break.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And I'm going to say the best thing to do is to actually farm out that assessment in the semester prior, and to try to look at it in small chunks, and you can actually do it through the semester as time permits.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Sue has just shown you her criteria. She does that like the semester before.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So we get to the point where you know you give the you come up with the prep. Work. Send it out to the liaisons. They have several weeks to review it.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and then we can. We can start pulling it cart by cart and not overwhelm our tech services staff or the space, because it's already all been approved.
Jen Parker (Cortland): In the case of the Tmc.
Jen Parker (Cortland): What we had to do I was the tech services interim librarian. I had one clerk and a couple assistant librarians, and we realized in September that the we were out of space in several areas.
Jen Parker (Cortland): It hadn't had a good weed
Jen Parker (Cortland): our liaison for the Tmc. Lisa was very concerned about the idea of weeding during the semester, but we came up with a workflow that let the clerks pull based on usage.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We moved them into a temp location
Jen Parker (Cortland): and then so the templation. The whole purpose of that was to hide it from Primo. So we already knew they weren't highly used.
Jen Parker (Cortland): If somebody on the staff needed to be able to find them like, sir. Got a request for one that came in late.
Jen Parker (Cortland): It could be it was hidden. And then based on
Jen Parker (Cortland): the the
Jen Parker (Cortland): clerk.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and well, sorry. The assistant librarians would pull a cart
Jen Parker (Cortland): they'd review the cart. They'd leave it in a place for Lisa to review, as she had time.
Jen Parker (Cortland): which was usually on a Friday, and more over breaks. So at any point where her holding area overflowed, we just paused.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And so in that way we were able to withdraw 10,000 items for the Tnc. During the school year.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Now, I will tell you. The biggest pass was the one Lisa did at the end.
Jen Parker (Cortland): For the X factor and currency.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And I really suggest doing that at the end, because
Jen Parker (Cortland): it's so subjective. And, as Sue said, we don't want to do Reshlfs, so pull the stuff for the objective criteria like usage first.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and then go back and send the liaison out to look for the things that are specific to their area. Have them pull the carts.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and it it just made for such a more effective workflow for us.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So Lisa's section was by list. Some of the periodicals have been by list.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Sometimes we've encouraged
Jen Parker (Cortland): librarians to take a car down to the stacks and do a drive by hey? Go go look for ick in your collection.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And in the case of periodicals
Jen Parker (Cortland): that was really more a move. We had to take what we wanted out of the periodicals area and move it to a different area in the building completely. So Sue did that title by title, moving the holdings.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So if you want to go ahead and move that please.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Okay, so some of the things that we learned when we were doing this work is to recruit volunteers wherever you can.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We did recycle parties. So again, I only had one clerk and me doing the withdrawals.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and to heave carts of books out into the Dumpster is a lot of work when you've got 10,000 items.
Jen Parker (Cortland): so I would process the carts. She would do the physical processing, and we'd line all the carts up, and then I'd put out a call for anybody who was involved, and say, Hey, recycle party at one on a Friday, and we'd take all the carts out the back door and heave them into the Dumpster.
Jen Parker (Cortland): We also the book slide. We have a video of that later. But during our periodical project over Christmas we were moving things that we were withdrawing from the second floor to from the third floor down to the second floor. In the elevator died.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Sue came up with a book slide and tried to make it fun for the people who were working on it. And this was another case where I would just put out a call in the chat and say, Hey, we're going to do this for 3 h. Who's got an hour they can give me.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and we would get people because it's a way to break up the day. You feel very productive, but you're not sucking up their whole day doing it. So we got a lot of people from other areas of the library.
Jen Parker (Cortland): The other place we get volunteers is Sue's got these lists that have been approved by liaisons. I hang that outside my door.
Jen Parker (Cortland): and then, as our Iol clerk, who has been fantastic, has
Jen Parker (Cortland): had time. Sometimes one of the other liaisons goes out because they just want something. You know, something productive to do this kind of mindless for an hour they go out and pull stuff and then bring the card in. We know they're approved. They can just get withdrawn.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I've shown you. Here. We have a little area in tech services for the weeding carts, and we have a routing slip this was a lesson learned from the Tmc. To keep track for each cart. Has it been reviewed? Who's pulled it?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Where did where did it come from? Has it been withdrawn from Alma?
Jen Parker (Cortland): Has it been physically processed, etc?
Jen Parker (Cortland): I did try to do some project management with the Tmc. And with the periodical Sue, if you could advance
Jen Parker (Cortland): found that tracking at the location or sections works well. Tracking at the cart level was a disaster, because different locations you end up with like 3 carts per location, and some of them were resells. And it just
Jen Parker (Cortland): it was too messy
Jen Parker (Cortland): but we have been able to track somewhat. We use team dynamics. I'm guessing a lot of you also have team dynam dynamics
Jen Parker (Cortland): to track the different things, and it just functions like a to-do list for our projects.
Jen Parker (Cortland): And then, if you can advance the slide again, please Sue.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So our lessons learned in total. And as you've seen. We've got lots of hic.
Jen Parker (Cortland): small areas. Get buy-in from the liaisons, collaborate with anybody in the building who's willing to help
Jen Parker (Cortland): and try to reduce your resells.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So if you want to show we have a couple of slides of
Jen Parker (Cortland): this is a video. When the slides go up you'll be able to see the video of the book slide in action.
sue.slivan: Yeah, I. This was after we were done, and the elevator started working again. So I don't have my action video.
sue.slivan: But it's a chunk of gutter. I got it low, as it was $6 and a couple of ratchet tiedowns, and the thing was we were
sue.slivan: driving hurts to the edge.
sue.slivan: handing books down, driving another car to the edge. And I'm like this needs to be faster. And someone said we could just slide them down the concrete, so we'd slide it down this concrete 45 degrees, and then another person would stand at the end and fling the book down to a person down at the bottom, where they were loading boxes.
sue.slivan: It was tremendous fun.
sue.slivan: I think that's the end of our slides.
Jen Parker (Cortland): I think there's one more.
sue.slivan: Is there?
sue.slivan: Oh, there we go. Oh, okay, this was, yeah. I don't know. If any of you are using better world books, but they kind of
sue.slivan: drop the ball on contracting. I think maybe they've got too much stuff nowadays, and we couldn't come to an agreement with them, regardless of what that was with the financial department. So we ended up boxing it all up
sue.slivan: and
sue.slivan: This is what we have right now. We we needed the carts that they were all sitting on. And we've got a couple interested parties through Suny's project create.
sue.slivan: I'd like to get more in there. I'm not sure how that works on the back end. But we've been communicating with our facilities, Guy, and someone at Suny
sue.slivan: to offer these items
sue.slivan: as opposed to having to destroy them, which was, we learned halfway through that you cannot just throw hard covers in the dumpster. We got a nasty gram that said, Hey, you have to actually destroy the Hardcovers, and that that changed the game a whole lot that slowed everything down.
Cori Wilhelm: Alright. Thank you. That's that is great, and it looks like Angela also had a slide.
Cori Wilhelm: I love the creativity and problem solving.
Cori Wilhelm: Our last presenter and let me pull up the slides is Jason Parker, the library information technology specialist at Ub. Libraries. And
Cori Wilhelm: there we go.
Cori Wilhelm: and you can take it away. Jason.
Jason Parker: Well, I am going to talk about some of the tools that we developed here to help with our weeding projects.
Jason Parker: None of them were fun like slides, but you know
Jason Parker: on the other hand, not only do I envy your slides, I also envy your having collection policies, and you know
Jason Parker: things like that.
Jason Parker: So we've been weeding since
Jason Parker: 2022, and we probably sort of started before that
Jason Parker: And we're doing this because we're having to do the
Jason Parker: cabbage rabbit fox
Jason Parker: puzzle with our entire collection around several different renovations and moves and things like that.
Jason Parker: And in addition to all that, we haven't done a systematic weed or had a weeding policy for.
Jason Parker: Well, I say, over a decade.
Jason Parker: I've been here almost 20 years, and I don't think we've had one in that period, so we might have had one
Jason Parker: during that. But I don't think we've ever had a good policy
Jason Parker: but so we have to go through and do a mass weed of our Lockwood library, which we're gonna have to go through and do a second one, because a new project came up.
Jason Parker: and a math weed of our library annex because it'd been used as a garbage bin for a while, and also because we need to move stuff into it.
Jason Parker: and then a little bit of stuff about how we're trying to
Jason Parker: not get rid of certain things.
Jason Parker: Can you bump us along?
Jason Parker: Thank you. So
Jason Parker: since we
Jason Parker: we, since we don't have a weeding policy or a collections policy, or at the time, anybody who could, you know, force one through.
Jason Parker: Instead, we convinced administration to throw money at the problem.
Jason Parker: so instead of having me sit around and have to create a new report for every selector and every subject area, because they all have their own criteria.
Jason Parker: We just spent a bunch of money on green glass from Oclc. And uploaded holdings.
Jason Parker: which was nice, because then we could automatically do to like last copy checks.
Jason Parker: or even and even expand that out to are there holdings
Jason Parker: in peer institutions that we could get through ill things like that.
Jason Parker: So that was really handy.
Jason Parker: we loved it a lot because we could just farm out building the list to the selectors.
Jason Parker: and then we send students to pull the material one of the things we knew we didn't want to do was just run our jobs from the list on the Assumption students found the material
Jason Parker: because that's
Jason Parker: just a recipe for bad.
Jason Parker: So
Jason Parker: what we did was we built a
Jason Parker: custom, little python application that. I'm dropping the Github link in the chat for
Jason Parker: that. All it does is it goes through and builds physical item sets
Jason Parker: in Alma via the Api. It has, like a number of error checking things in it that we had to develop over to forever. Business that we're on.
Jason Parker: But that's essentially all it does. The student pulls a cart full of books, sit down down next to it with a scanner, pops open the application, scan, scan, scan.
Jason Parker: We've got a set we can work with. That's the actual items that were found and the actual ones that are going out to be recycled
Jason Parker: Once we've got that set built,
Jason Parker: staff member runs the physical item set job so that we can get
Jason Parker: drop because we like to add a statistics. Note to everything that we're withdrawing as part of process as opposed to items that are withdrawn as part of an Alma automated process.
Jason Parker: and like helps keep our numbers clean.
Jason Parker: And then we do to withdraw items. Job.
Jason Parker: because that's just what you do.
Jason Parker: air reports
Jason Parker: go for cleanup
Jason Parker: and then
Jason Parker: material. We sent out via Hannah paper for recycling.
Jason Parker: and while we're still doing that, and there's
Jason Parker: I'm not going to say we're our. We're their biggest contract, but we're probably one of our bigger state contracts at this point.
Jason Parker: Can you skip ahead?
Jason Parker: Thank you. And also we're doing the Annex.
Jason Parker: We're using green glass there to
Jason Parker: figure out what we have
Jason Parker: digitally
Jason Parker: so that we can just pull that if we have perpetual access.
Jason Parker: And so we just
Jason Parker: once we've got that list over there.
Jason Parker: They, the staff at the Annex pulls it from storage.
Jason Parker: and instead of
Jason Parker: creating sites with it, what they do is they de assessing it from our annex inventory system. We're currently on Kaya soft. So you know, if you're on an older system, it may or may not be possible.
Jason Parker: And then
Jason Parker: we get a daily report of everything that's been de assessed, and from the annex inventory system that we usually just load in has a file to create the physical set in. Alma.
Jason Parker: Run the stuff.
Jason Parker: Send the error. Report over
Jason Parker: quick as you like.
Jason Parker: Next, please.
Jason Parker: Okay, this is kind of a
Jason Parker: brave new world for us, cause the retention field. They're only a year old, and we've actually never in addition, never having a weeding policy. We've never really had a retention policy. There's been several like informal ones, but nothing set in stone.
Jason Parker: So what we're going to do is take advantage of Alma's item level retention fields
Jason Parker: and the
Jason Parker: first, and
Jason Parker: which is going to be handy because it'll stop us from withdrawing at the job level. Even if it gets pulled by accident, it can't be withdrawn.
Jason Parker: The most complicated part of that, so far, has been configuring the retents and reasons table
Jason Parker: because
Jason Parker: everybody
Jason Parker: wants to have their own special snowflake reasons, but the longer the table gets the harder it is to actually, you know, do anything with it. So we've had to like keep some pruning back there
Jason Parker: and load several different versions of the table.
Jason Parker: because that's just how life is.
Jason Parker: But we've got 2 methods that we're using right now depending on where we're getting it.
Jason Parker: Some selectors we have sending us
Jason Parker: batches of bar codes because they've already gone through and done reviewed that way.
Jason Parker: and then we just use the change. Item, information job.
Jason Parker: reset all the field, all the retention fields in there. Move along.
Jason Parker: Also for more individual control.
Jason Parker: We've built a Php page that's not yet integrated to the workflow.
Jason Parker: What it does is
Jason Parker: the selector scans, selects the reason for retention.
Jason Parker: scans the bar code, and then the record is updated via Api.
Jason Parker: with the note the committed to retain. And the reason has selected
Jason Parker: which right now, in testing it's working great. We're gonna see if we can actually get people to use it
Jason Parker: and use it efficiently.
Jason Parker: One fall down with the Api.
Jason Parker: And this is something that you know
Jason Parker: gave me fits until I figured it out
Jason Parker: the way
Jason Parker: X. Libus has it configured. You need, in addition to sending the changed fields.
Jason Parker: you need to send all the fields you need to send the unchanged item fields to, or else it'll blank them out.
Jason Parker: Why, they designed the item update. I. Api. That way, I have no idea.
Jason Parker: but that's what we've got so far.
Jason Parker: And then our last little note
Jason Parker: is that when we do to attend to note whether it's by the job or through the Api.
Jason Parker: What we're containing in that is the date that
Jason Parker: it was marked for retention, so that we can go through using analytics later, and just find everything that was marked for retention
Jason Parker: during a time period and tell people to review it
Jason Parker: or A, and we're also containing the username for the staff member who
Jason Parker: is retained, who wanted it retained
Jason Parker: also. So we can go back and ask them, you know, is this still valid? Why, at some point, or if we need to do a second, pass through.
Jason Parker: because we can't get sufficient storage space for a moving project or something like that
Jason Parker: but yeah, like, I said, this was mainly tool focused, and that's all I've really got. But yeah.
Cori Wilhelm: Alright, so we've got about 15 min for questions. And you can feel free to raise your hand or to throw a question in the chat, and I do have one to start with from the the question submitter form we made and it was, how much faculty input is wise. And it seems like we had kind of varying levels of faculty input but if anyone wants to jump in and comment.
Jason Parker: I it just
Jason Parker: speaking as myself.
Jason Parker: I feel like that may be a decision based on the size of your campus.
Jason Parker: because the more faculty. And the more items, the more complicated that's going to be.
Cori Wilhelm: and we had a question earlier, kind of related about what are some of the pushbacks you've experienced from faculty so
Cori Wilhelm: has anyone had pushback
Cori Wilhelm: based on faculty input or faculty response to this.
Cori Wilhelm: And how did you handle that?
Alana Nuth: I think Jason's right that a lot of it depends on campus culture, and I think there's a balance between communicating and being transparent. But then also making it like it, a thing like I know it. I described our situation here in Genesco and my former institution. We did a large scale weed, and we hosted like town halls. So faculty come in person.
Alana Nuth: And I visited department meetings, and there was lots of email. And it was so difficult, and I think part of it was like there was tensions between the library and the faculty.
Alana Nuth: but I think also we made such a big thing out of it. The faculty lost sight of the fact that this is normal collection management and collection maintenance, and that every library does it, and so, by bringing so much attention to it that made them think, oh, we need to pay attention to it, and we need to scrutinize title by title with the library is doing so. I think a lot of it's like Jason, said, culture.
Alana Nuth: and then communicating, I think it helps when there's a renovation happening. I think faculty are less likely to push back if there's some sort of objective reason beyond, the library is reducing its collection.
Cori Wilhelm: Alright! Thanks.
Angela Rhodes she/her: Yeah, I'll echo off Echo off of that as well is that you know, in our case, you know, we communicated early with the with the entire campus and we are a much smaller campus. But part of our communication. We were very clear about what we were weeding, you know. So we made sure that
Angela Rhodes she/her: you know faculty and administrators knew that. You know the the information that we retained, you know, based on our collection development policies was that we had sort of like permanent retention policies for anything that was considered a core program or a core major to the campus, and that pretty much
Angela Rhodes she/her: took care of almost every faculty member on the campus. They were like, Oh, you're not weeding my area. Okay? I'm good, you know. So like I I think part of that was, you know what you plan on weeding as well. So like in our case we were, we were incredibly specific in saying.
Angela Rhodes she/her: we're only weeding things that are not within core programs. And we are only weeding things that are
Angela Rhodes she/her: that have not been touched in 13 years, and sometimes that kind of justification, you know people saying, Well, how can you get rid of the books and like, What if somebody needs it. I'm like nobody's need it in 13 years. Do you need it? And then they th those kinds of those kinds of communications end up kind of
Angela Rhodes she/her: helping people understand and see where we come from. As a libraries like we are not get. Our space is not getting any bigger. You know you have you have to let us remove some things from the collection. And I I think that helps to create. You know you. You lay it out as realistically as you possibly can. And and I think I think you know, there's some understanding there. So.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, that's great.
Cori Wilhelm: Any questions from our audience.
Cori Wilhelm: I can throw a few more in. But I wanted to give everyone an opportunity.
Cori Wilhelm: Alright, has anybody
Cori Wilhelm: found something surprising in their collection, or
Cori Wilhelm: learned something about the collection when reading.
Cori Wilhelm: I'm sure you found some, you know
Cori Wilhelm: outdated things sometimes when in a former weeding project I led, we would, you know.
Cori Wilhelm: have kind of the best of the week, and collect the books and put them on a.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Say that.
Cori Wilhelm: So currently reviewed.
Jen Parker (Cortland): So we found a lot of Eck. Sue has been posting it. She has an Instagram called Stack finds where we we she shares the worst of the worst that we find.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Dummy bears on things like that are covered in dust like have dust, funny blankets, kinda things that if are just so disgusting, like we had in our slides.
Cori Wilhelm: That ek factor is.
Jen Parker (Cortland): Yes.
Cori Wilhelm: And it sounds like most of you, your your why, for weeding was about the physical space
Cori Wilhelm: did
Cori Wilhelm: digital collections or resource sharing come into play at all
Cori Wilhelm: when deciding.
Cori Wilhelm: you know, we need to haul out half of the library's collection, or anything like that.
Jason Parker: I. It it has with
Jason Parker: of some of our criteria, because, as I said, we were checking to see how many other copies were available. Is it common enough? We can aisle it if we need it.
Jason Parker: And also with our annex, we'd
Jason Parker: do. We already have this digital in per in perpetual access. And can we just chalk it
Jason Parker: from that?
Jason Parker: But yeah, Eds.
Jason Parker: that I'd say there's like a certain level of variance depending on which selector we were dealing with to.
Jason Parker: But yeah.
Jason Parker: it's easier with serials to say we're going to chuck something because we've got e access than it is with monographs just due to turnover.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah. And I think ub is probably a little different with that annex, because a lot of other campuses were able to get rid of things
Cori Wilhelm: because you'd be was the one holding them. So you may be the last to copy. We have a couple of amazing haikus in the chat. If you get a chance to to look at them from Maureen.
Cori Wilhelm: she's always
Cori Wilhelm: riding cool. Haikus for thanks.
Cori Wilhelm: Any other questions from our audience.
Cori Wilhelm: Is anyone going through weeding right now?
Cori Wilhelm: Oh, and that is a question I have for the group, for those of you who have policies related to weeding or collection development. Are you willing to share them? And if you are, I'll shoot you the link to upload them, and we would love to to
Cori Wilhelm: collect those and post them on the old estate. Susan, go ahead.
Susan Davis (UB): Yes, I this isn't a a question so much as just.
Susan Davis (UB): you know, expounding a little bit more on what what Jason has said, and when he's talking about we don't have these policies.
Susan Davis (UB): he's right. And it's sort of amazing that we've gotten to the point where we where we are with without these policies. Maybe that's because sometimes we've had, you know, powerful personalities who
Susan Davis (UB): dictate what's going on. But
Susan Davis (UB): you know the the annex? Con well, no, I should start out with the last copy in Sunni again. There was some traffic about that, because we thought that was a policy, or there was this rule of 3 or something. And again, that may have been an informal discussion with many of the the collection heads across the Sunnis. And so that was very interesting to learn that that really wasn't like the rule we have so much lore.
Susan Davis (UB): It's, you know, sort of like, handed down from from generation to generation. So it's really interesting. And I was shocked because I was here when the original, the first annex finally came into being, and my recollection was. People made great efforts to deduplicate, you know, because we had sciences. We had health sciences. There's a lot of overlap. There was overlap in other areas.
Susan Davis (UB): And why? Why are we moving duplicates to the Annex? Then it turns out, there actually are a lot of duplicates in the Annex. And it's it just shows that sometimes, like what you had at at Genesee, Elena, that there's this rush. You have to do something in a certain amount of time, and it's always sad how
Susan Davis (UB): later on, you know, you paid the price for not having like thought it through so kudos to those of you who were able to plan Morrisville. That's actually pretty impressive how you were able to go through things. Obviously at Genesio it was a bit different, and
Susan Davis (UB): it was even more complicated because you were dealing with the building that had asbestos. So I hope Milton will be opening soon. That's what we hear. So I look forward to seeing the the new library at Genesia when it's already so, thanks.
Alana Nuth: Thank you, Susan. I will say one benefit is like, when everyone was talking about recycling or having like we didn't have to do any of that like we had a flag, what books we wanted to keep, which was like a whole other story. But like we didn't have to discard anything because it was considered
Alana Nuth: like asbestos waste.
Cori Wilhelm: Yeah, thanks, Susan. We do have a question in the chat about what campuses are doing with the saved space from their weaving projects, and Jen shared about Portland. They're making room and
Cori Wilhelm: putting some office space where periodicals were anyone else.
Angela Rhodes she/her: Yeah, I had posted in the chat. But essentially so the building, the entire library, is going under renovation, and the plan is to move in other academic support services into the building. So the the space that currently the the footprint of of our collection takes up needs to be reduced to make room for those other programs.
Cori Wilhelm: And that often seems the case, I think.
Cori Wilhelm: as as more offices want to come into the library. We do need to make a little more space.
Cori Wilhelm: Any more questions from the group.
Cori Wilhelm: and we will share the slides out from this. As well as
Cori Wilhelm: We already have. Some of the collection development policy links in the chat. But we will be collecting those, and for other campuses who are on the call if you want to share your collection development policy or reading policy with Olis. We are curating a list and hope to post that on the Olis site for everyone.
Cori Wilhelm: Hmm!
Cori Wilhelm: There's a few more comments in the chat.
Cori Wilhelm: And one last question I guess I had.
Cori Wilhelm: It sounds like most of the books were dumpstered or recycled.
Cori Wilhelm: Is that the case on everyone's campus, Carlin? It looks like you did some work with better world.
sue.slivan: Yeah, we've got until until we didn't. We would prefer to
sue.slivan: have them be reused, but
sue.slivan: they have a pretty limited scope of what they'll take. So anything that was
sue.slivan: you know any of the periodicals? None of those were going to be donatable.
sue.slivan: But the children's books are definitely the the ones that are in good condition are definitely
sue.slivan: good for donating somewhere, finding someone to take. It was a problem.
Cori Wilhelm: and there was a question in the chat, is there a state law against dumpster, diving, I believe, because it is State property.
Cori Wilhelm: Yes.
Cori Wilhelm: even the garbage is state property. So I think that's the case. But obviously I don't know who's policing this. If you know you have really
Cori Wilhelm: excited faculty who want to go through the the book. Dumpster.
Angela Rhodes she/her: I can comment on that. So I did look up. There is a it's a state law that because, like Corey said, because it's State property.
Angela Rhodes she/her: It is illegal to go dumpster diving like to to pull things out of the dumpster, and but
Angela Rhodes she/her: also it wasn't policed. So our our Dumpster was pretty much right outside of the library over the summer, and we had several groups of people that, like we had one that literally pulled up a letter, a step letter to the front of the dumpster and and jumped right in.
Angela Rhodes she/her: But yeah, technically it is. It is state law. So whenever we did see somebody in the dumpster, we did go out and let them know
Angela Rhodes she/her: about the law.
Angela Rhodes she/her: And then
Angela Rhodes she/her: turned a blind eye.
Cori Wilhelm: Oh, and you'd be looks like they have a covered, a covered bin. So
Jason Parker: Well, we we need to use particular bins with Hannah, and they've got their pickup stuff, and
Jason Parker: it's up.
Jason Parker: That's the whole thing.
Cori Wilhelm: Alright. Well, thank you so much to our panelists, and thank you to our audience.