Age of our collection

I spent the remainder of my funds last week. And in the process, I learned something about our collection. Portions of it are very old! I thought I'd check the ancient history section to see what was currently on the shelves in order to determine how many new volumes to purchase. The majority of books were as old as I (if not older). So, I get distracted and decided to do some weeding. One hundred books later, the ancient history section and the rest of the 900s (history and geography) looked much better and needless to say, I purchased 2 new sets of ancient history instead of the one I was originally planning on.

Weeding is something that many library media need to do, but don't always make it a priority (myself included). To ensure a dynamic, relevant, attractive collection adding new titles and weeding old no longer appropriate titles is necessary. Our collection age is currently 1992. The majority of our students are younger than the average age of our books. Do you think this helps to make books interesting or worthwhile? And my school is not alone. Collection ages for some of the other schools in the Keys range from 1989 to 1994. It's not surprising that students are turning to technology because they think that books are obsolete if this is what they see in their schools.

As for Coral Shores, our science and social science sections are in very good shape, so I'll be looking through the arts, literature, and reference for outdated materials. My goal is to get our collection age younger than many of the students, although it may take several years of weeding and ordering new books for that to happen. At least the students will see more current, attractive, and accurate books on the shelves!