Boulder City Magazine is a monthly publication full of information about Boulder City and Southern Nevada. Boulder City Magazine features the Boulder City Home Guide, a real estate guide to Boulder City and Southern Nevada.



Library Corner
by S. Lynn Schofield-Dahl, Director
Boulder City Library

Weeding
You all know that the Library buys books and other materials such as DVDs and Audiobooks for our patrons to use. When people don’t have the items checked out, materials sit on the shelves at the Library, anxiously waiting for someone to check them out, take them home and read/use them.

The truth is that if you didn’t check out materials from the Library, we wouldn’t have enough room in the Library to put all of our materials on the shelves. Even when we do have materials checked out, space on the shelves can get pretty tight, and we need to find more space to shelve new items. That is when we librarians do something called “weeding”.

When we "weed" our collection, we remove from our shelves the books and other materials that people don’t seem to want to use any longer.

When a person checks out an item, the computer keeps track of that item’s circulation. We can check the computer and see when the last time an item was checked out and how many times that item was checked out since it was added to the collection.

Let’s say I find a book on the shelf that is in really poor condition, the kind of book that no one really wants to take home because it just looks yucky. I can look that book up in the computer and see if it has been checked out recently and how many times it was checked out since it was added to the collection. If the book has not been borrowed in at least 5 years, it is a good candidate to get “weeded”.

If, however, the book has been borrowed a lot and has been borrowed recently, it may mean that I need to order a new copy that is in better condition. We also pull materials that are obsolete.

When we "weed" books from the collection, we save them for the annual book sale. Books that don’t move during the sale are shipped off to our resale broker. They, in turn, send us a percentage of their sales so we can buy more books. Thus the cycle starts again.

You can find out more by visiting our web site at www.bclibrary.org



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