Weeding the Reference Collection: a Review of the Literature

the actual mechanics of performing this activity vary widely and is the cause of much concern in libraries. Furthermore, the actual decision process for selecting an item to be culled from the primary collection is not fixed, and varies according to the type of library under study and/or to the mandate of the library. Thus, the approach to weeding taken by a small public library has an outcome almost unique to small public libraries, which may differ substantially from the outcomes obtainable by special or by research libraries. Slote (1989) demands that librarians approach this question with a very binary intent in mind. First, there will be items that will be identified as used, and second, there will be items that will be identified as unused. The methods that he proposes require that these two complementary subsets be ascertained accurately. Following this stage, the decisions to weed have already been made for the librarian: “no volume in the core collection should be considered for weeding . . . [a]ll books in the noncore collection are candidates for weeding, and probably should be weeded” (p. 83). Ettelt (1992) asks the five pivotal questions that all librarians must ask at one time or another when their library reaches the point of capacity: