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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.