Friday, March 27, 2015

Yearly Weeding Post

http://gabytaangeles.tumblr.com/post/65677184278/null
http://gabytaangeles.tumblr.com/
post/65677184278/null
May have said it best two years ago:
http://msyinglingreads.blogspot.com/2013/04/weeding-sad-sad-story.html

Today is the last day before spring break. This means that we have made it through January, February, and the first round of testing! Hooray!

I'm running a little late on my March cleaning, but managed to get my yearly round of weeding done in a much shorter amount of time than usual.

Between the money I get from the school district (about $10 per student), $1,000 from the PTO, and books that I acquire for reviewing or from other sources (Reading Warehouse clearance, for nonfiction), I added 1,017 books to the collection this year! If I don't get rid of some books, things would soon get out of hand!

It's actually gotten easier-- the books I pulled this year are falling to pieces, smell bad, or have begun to annoy me because they just take up shelf space. If students won't read a book no matter how much I try to sell it, it needs to move on to a better place. I only pulled about 250 books this year. Many were nonfiction books that are enormously long. The new nonfiction books are a quarter of the width of the old ones, so we have plenty of nonfiction space.

I will probably pull another 50 books during inventory, because some of my most popular books are in absolute tatters. It was a good thing I had ten copies of The Hunger Games or Twilight; now I might be able to find one or two that are not held together with chewing gum and baling wire. I need to replace some of my Anthony Horowitz and Rick Riordan books. I WISH I could replace my Darren Shan Cirque du Freak books, but the only place that I can get them in hard cover is Half Price Books. Yes, this would be why I have at least two of all of the Zom-B titles.

It would be nice to post a picture of my repair pile this morning-- I have about fifty books that need glue, tape, etc. One of my volunteers spends an hour or so every week just putting books back together. My students aren't particularly hard on things, but books do wear out. I'm glad that they are wearing out rather than rusting out!

Weeding is so hard that it requires cute puppies. It makes the library a more organized place, though, so it's worth it.


5 comments:

  1. How funny. I look at it as dead-heading. They were so pretty before and now they are ragged with brittle petals falling to the floor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I used to volunteer at the school library and I spent many hours weeding and repairing. it's a lot of work!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Have you looked at the site Awful Library Books? It will give you many laughs (which you may need with all the depressing books coming out) plus it will make you feel really good about weeding. And it will make you pat yourself on the back by saying, "Wow. No matter how many old books I may have left on my shelves, I never had anything as bad as THAT!"

    ReplyDelete
  4. i met you on wednesday at the 'move up' night. My son currently is in 6th grade there though. We have never seen the zom b series. I just looked it up and now he and i both want to read them all. Also, saw the Cirque De Freak (sp) book and you have got us excited to read these. Appreciate it!

    ReplyDelete