Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

collection_name = gets.chomp

books = Array.new

Book.where(collection: collection_name).find_each do |book|
books.push
end


weed_candidates = Array.new

books.each do |book|

if book.type == fiction && book.publication_date <= 2.years_ago && (book.circ_ytd < 4 || book.circ_lastyear < 4), weed_candidates.push
end

if book.type == nonfiction && book.publication_date <= 5.years_ago && (book.circ_ytd < 4 || book.circ_lastyear < 4 || (book.circ_lifetime / (Time.now.year - book.publication_date.year)) < 4),
weed_candidates.push
end

end

After that, it requires a certain amount of human intervention, looking at condition of the material, whether it has friends in a series that are going well, whether it's an award-winner (which doesn't necessarily save it from its fate) and so forth. There's also some looking on things that escape this algorithm to catch the things that are circulating but in bad condition or that have circulated sufficiently that they may need replacement copies. But that's the basic way that I handle making decisions about which books are to be considered for dismissal based on their circulation. Other material types have different baselines, but the idea is the same.

A thing we always have to remember is that the computer can make suggestions, but the humans always have the final day on whether something stays or goes. Always.

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

In case you were wondering, this is the life cycle of materials for many library systems. It doesn't quite have as much visual imagery as your nature documentary, but it is hopefully interesting.

Materials start with a purchase order or decision from the librarian in charge of the collection the materials will end up in. In larger libraries, these selection duties may be divided up among multiple librarians. In smaller libraries and in school libraries, selection is often the provenance of one person and their often-underfunded budget. The selector has to be pretty widely read on which materials their community would want to have in their library. The exponential growth of publishing, both online and in print, makes total knowledge a near impossibility, and the people that suffer the most are usually independent presses and publishers and authors, because their works do not always appear in the review publications used as a time-saver, and because those places are also not often in the databases of the large companies that help libraries do the work of buying and preparing their materials.

Each item that has been selected, once bought, will need to have an appropriate record created for it in the library's catalog. Original cataloging these days is mostly farmed out to companies like OCLC, and records (almost always in the MAchine Readable Cataloging format (MARC)) are purchased from them so that there can be mass importation of the new items into the catalog, once each item has the unique barcode attached. So, items bought from distributors, records bought from the same. Each item will need to be prepared with a spine label indicating the call number for the item, any additional information, like genre, attached to the spine, and then a barcode attached. This work is often done by hand, which can sometimes serve as a first quality check on the materials.

Once cataloged and prepared, items can be circulated, and are usually distributed first to fill requests made by users for the item when there was a record, but no items. After the initial flurry of requests, items eventually settle into the locations where they have been assigned, to be requested and sent around or checked it at their leisure. It's usually at this step - checking in for requests and the shelves - that I actually see materials in my branch. More often than not, new things go to a particular shelf or display to try and catch the eye of novelty-seekers for a quick checkout, or they join a thematic display to catch the eye of someone interested in a particular thing. After they've spent time as the new hotness, most material then settles down for the rest of its life in the proper place on the regular shelves, arranged on the order prescribed for its material type. Popular things get checked out repeatedly, sometimes not having a lot of time on the shelf before going out again, at least while they remain popular.

Some of our materials suffer wounds from usage, both intended and not, at this stage. Some things can be patched, other damage isn't enough to pull the object, and some of our materials remain popular enough that the sheer volume of usage ages and harms them. More than a few of the initial run of any given title suffer fatal damage, whether all at once or over time. Some of the genius involved in selection is knowing how much attrition there will be and allowing it to happen such that the amount of copies that are left after the wave is exactly the right amount that was desired for the long-term.

Those that are not sacrificed at the maw of the public in their desire are then subjected to the back side of the life cycle of the material - deaccession, or more informally, weeding. Every library has a limited space available for its materials. Only, perhaps, the Library of Congress would have sufficient space and mandate to house every work produced. To make room for the new things that will be coming, old things and unpopular things must make way. Not everything that is old or unpopular will be sent off - the "classics" are often spared such a fate, until a new edition with a different cover arrives as an attempt to be attractive to the current audience. Items with relevance and information that is unlikely to change may be kept on for years, even if they only go out on school assignment times. But the majority of things will eventually fade away from popularity, and will not turn out to be classic works, and ask they will effectually be caught in the weeding process and removed from the shelves. Depending on the policy and the material type, some things are recycled, others are sent onward to a Friends of the Library sale, and still others are sent to a surplus warehouse, where they are often resold on Amazon or other websites and eventually become part of someone else's collection until their eventual inability to be used any more.

Sometimes certain books get reordered for another to in a new copy, but for some books, that stint is the only time they will sit on a library shelf. The constant pressure of new materials always beckons and demands that only that which is either really good or really popular stay.