Shelf Challenge-Ms

I joined the Shelf Challenge about three years ago.  This challenge has really helped me weed my library.

Weeding a library can be such a scary, overwhelming activity!  My first year as a librarian I could not bring myself to weed.  But my second year... every book shook on the shelf.  No book was safe!  I was a weeding machine thanks to this challenge!

Our school library management system, Follett, has redesigned the report that tells you the age of your collection.  It now breaks it down into fiction and nonfiction.  After running this report at the beginning of the year I realized I have done a pretty good job of weeding and purchasing new nonfiction books but my fiction section... my fiction section is killing me! Or killing my collection age but it feels like a personal killing. Ha!

So this year I chose to weed fiction.  The lovely librarians over at Shelf Challenge assigned me Ms. So I headed over to the M shelf between classes Monday and got to work.

Some books were easy to weed, they were colored all over and/or the covers were just plain unappealing.  Other books made me pause.

Ugh.  The ones that make me pause.

So I headed over to the computer to see when the book was checked out last.  Then I had to decide if the book had just gotten lost on the shelf or if a book from 1991 (which in my head is only like 10 years ago... but is really 26 years ago.  Reality really stinks!) is still relevant to my students today in 2017.

This year I decided to do blackout poetry with weeded books.  So that helped with some of my decision making.

On a side note, I tweeted about the shelf challenge and it was put on the Shelf Challenge blog.  You can see my tweet in this post!  So cool!