Author: Sara Amato

Communicating About Weeding

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections and the Rosemont Shared Print Alliance joint Communications and Advocacy Working Group is pleased to announce new resources to support libraries’ communications efforts around major weeding projects (PDF | Google Sheet | 1 page diagram). These resources provide a guide for talking to library staff and campus and other user communities, and help collection managers and project coordinators anticipate and respond to users’ concerns about changes to library collections and spaces.

The new resources include 

  • an introduction that provides background on how the resources were developed and includes key takeaways and major recommendations that were surfaced in the interviews with library leaders and practitioners;
  • a matrix to support communication efforts in different project phases, organized into good, better, and best practices that represent an increasing investment of staff time or other resources, with examples of common pitfalls noted by interviewees;
  • an FAQ of user questions and comments, based on interviewee reflections and commonly reported reactions to weeding projects, with suggestions for anticipating the questions and accounting for common reactions during project planning; and
  • a diagram illustrating how collection space management and weeding projects fit into the overall lifecycle of collections.

These resources are now available on the Shared Print Toolkit’s Communications resources page, and are being made available under a CC BY Creative Commons license. Libraries are encouraged to reuse and adapt the materials as needed for their local needs.

Call for Participation on Working Groups

The Partnership for Shared Book Collections work is carried out by four Working Groups described below*, and is looking for volunteers with interest or expertise in the following areas to join existing working groups and/or task forces:

  • Communications and Advocacy for shared print programs (Communications and Advocacy Working Group)
  • Identifying gaps in the collective collection, including both print and digital (Infrastructure WG)
  • Collections and cataloging expertise (Infrastructure WG, Research and Network Level WG, Best Practices WG)
  • Resource Sharing, including metrics and methods (Infrastructure WG, Research and Network Level WG)
  • Defining workflows and best practices (Best Practices WG)

There are no fixed term commitments for the working groups. There is an annual review of membership yearly in July. Interest in serving can be expressed using this form: https://forms.gle/Ky6EcyaszbB3JkZa9. Since these working groups and task forces are, for the most part, ongoing, there is no specific deadline for joining. 

Thank you for your interest in the Partnership.