Weeding out old books

[Rathna Papanna Reddy]

Dear friends,

Kindly let me know the norms for weeding out old books in Engineering college library. Our management expressing doubt that if we weed out the books then it will impact AICTE norms fulfillment. Please clarify after weeding out can we show those books for AICTE norms.

Rathna

[venugopal]

Dear Reddy gaaru,

Please go through these points.

1.Take the report of highest circulated books.

2.Take the list of books i.e. not circulated even one time since last 4 or 5 years of span.

3.To weed out some old publications i.e fix some year like upto 1985 or 1990 then

 prepare the list.Make these old publications as archive. All the above mentioned jobs can be done by with the help of system administrator.

we have weed out upto 1985 publications as archives in 2005.

regards venugopal

[Siddhartha Shankar Ray]

Dear Rathna P. Reddy,

According to Dictionary meaning to Weed Out (which is a verb ) means TO REMOVE UNWANTED ELEMENTS!

As such, technically speaking, books which have been "weeded out" are practically removed from your stock.

I understand your dilemma and the concern of your authority. They are quite reasonable.

The solution therefore remains that you can show those books in your collection but want to get rid of the pile of stock as they are no longer relevant (as I presume in your case!) for rendering readers' service.

So you can easily do one thing; keep them in a separate place.  arrange them one after another according to accession numbers so that no space is required. Keep notes of this transaction in your accession Register. In that case, your Library will no longer be crammed with such materials, but you can always show those Valuable Reference Resources to the AICTE's visiting teams as well as to the audit people as and when necessary.

Incidentally, in  my previous place of service, we used to subscribe "Current Contents" which is weekly publication where only content pages of various journals with subject and Author Indexes and Addresses were published. "Current Contents" was one of the most sought after (and thereby sort of essential) material in a Scientific Research Institute till early-mid 90's. However, after a year their relevancy used to be practically nil!. Binding those materials (they were published in very thin newsprint papers!!) were simply wastage of money. So, we kept those 51 or 52 issues serially in a box while the years were marked in that box and kept them in a separate store room. Current Contents was a costly journal (published by ISI, Philadelphia) and subscription included Airmail charge. When the Audit party used to come for Physical check up of Library resources, they were pleased to see that the entire collection were serially kept. It was what one calls TUM-BHI KHUS; HUM BHI KHUS phenomena. So in your case, you can adopt the same old practice.

Sincerely,

Siddhartha S. Ray, Calcutta