Deselection in 15-20 Simple Steps

 Just a side note - for those that keep track of these things (probably Aviva or Doug), I am posting later than my regular time because I am participating in a "Family Writers Club", where for an hour, everyone logs onto the voice chat of the family Discord server and commits to writing together. I don't tend to have issues with finding time to write or writing for extended periods of time, but that's just me.

Back to our regularly scheduled blog post ...

I really liked reading the recent Toronto Star article on what teachers do during the summer. One reason was because I recognized the three teachers interviewed for the article. Matthew Morris is in my school board and is a great connector and speaker. His website is https://www.matthewrmorris.com/ Kimiko Shibata is an educator I've followed for a long time on Twitter. Her handle there is @ESL_fairy. The third educator quoted was my friend from PDSB (and OSLA days) Beth Lyons. I nodded my head frequently as I read about how they are cleaning their school spaces, taking AQ courses, and reviewing the new language curriculum in preparation for September. 

I'm doing similar things. Instead of taking AQs, I'm teaching them. In addition to the Queen's University Teacher Librarianship Specialist AQ that I started in late June, I'm co-leading the York University Teacher Librarianship Part 1 and Part 2 AQ courses. (I plan on taking my Media Part 2 AQ as a student in the fall.) For almost every day in that first week of July, I was in my school weeding my everybody book collection in the library in anticipation for an inventory of the entire school library collection in August. 

Weeding, or deselection, is an important part of a teacher-librarian's duties. I like the term "weeding", even though it is slowly falling out of favour, because it attempts to describe the process of nurturing a collection of resources like a garden. It's not meant to disparage the items that get removed, but just like dandelions are valued in some instances and resented in others (see this article from the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners group), some books are treasured in a collection while others are trash (or trashed). That's why it's important to know your school community before embarking on a large-scale weeding of a class library or school library. Another friend has spoken to me often of the zeal of newly minted teacher librarians who want their very first action in their new-to-them school library to involve deselecting books. My friend cautioned me so frequently about this practice that one of the assignments in one of the TL AQs involves asking participants to give examples of books that should or might or might not get removed from a collection. In the spring, when someone offered that a single title could fit in all three of these categories, I was delighted. That person realized that deselection is not as easy as it might first appear.

In the Toronto District School Board, Operational Procedure 531 governs the way we approach the selection and deselection of learning resources. The document is public and can be found here. Regarding deselection, PR531 states,

Deselection or selective weeding ensures that the school library collection contains only those resource materials that are accurate, current, and relevant to the curricular needs of the school. The development of an effective collection of resources requires periodic weeding to ensure balance, reliability, and comprehensiveness.

There are many other factors to consider when deciding whether or not it's time for a book to be retired from a collection. This Toronto Star article from 2023 (sorry, it's behind a paywall) explains some of the complexity.  

There are many other helpful resources when undertaking a project like this. TDSB has a pamphlet with guidelines, as well as a step-by-step flowchart of decisions to make through the process. (I wanted to clip an image from this guide, but today the TDSB Library and Learning Resources site is inaccessible.) Canadian School Libraries produced this awesome guide to Equity-Informed Weeding. The CSL website is particularly rich and meaningful. It does a wonderful job of explaining that what I am doing does not count as censorship. Here are a few important quotes from the document.

Resource selection is based on sound educational criteria unbiased by personal, political, social, or religious views. As selectors and weeders, library professionals are faced with difficult decisions when it comes to literature in particular. Literature offers a window into the diversity of human and social experiences and values, past and present. It is those very complexities that make literature appealing and relevant. It is sometimes those complexities that draw the attention of censors. Resources should be chosen because the balance of positive qualities far outweighs potential negative qualities, and this should be the primary consideration when making decisions about weeding. It is very important that the school library continue to provide access to a wide-ranging fiction and literature collection, and that the weeding process not be used as a vehicle for censorship.

Making decisions about whether or not to weed classics of children’s literature may come down to the purpose for these resources being in the collection in the first place. If they are included in picture book or fiction collections for the purpose of engaging our youngest readers, then it is clear that some beloved classics may be past their glory, and are candidates for removal from the collection. If, on the other hand, they are part of a secondary library collection for the purpose of literary study, as examples of the changing nature of children’s literature, for example, then it may be appropriate to keep them. A considered choice to keep the resource fosters students’ critical thinking capacity through the exploration of controversial issues and materials.

 

I regularly remove books that I find during the day-to-day operations of the library but sometimes a focused intervention is required. I examined my fiction collection in 2019 and my non-fiction collection in 2022, both as part of a school library space revitalization. I think it may have been 2017 that I last looked in-depth at the everybody book section. (This is what I call my picture book collection, so that it's clear that these books are for everyone, not just the youngest readers.)

I joke in the title of this blog post that it takes 15-20 steps, but there really are a lot of questions that have to be answered before a decision is made about a book.

I took some photos to illustrate the process.

The photo below is of the hardcover "R" and "S" sections. (In the school library where I work, we keep things pretty simple. For the Everybody books, they are sorted by the authors' last name, and then divided into hard cover and paperback, mainly because the paperbacks tend to get lost among the hard cover books.) In this photo, the books are jammed so tightly into the shelves that it is difficult to actually pull a book out. How would this be inviting?

I open and skim every single book. Then, I ask myself a ton of questions, based on the guidelines for deselection. I check out the publication date. How old is it? If it's old or older, is it a classic? If it's a classic, do I have another copy of it? If it's a classic, is it a timeless classic or one that just has nostalgia among readers of a certain era? Is it still relevant or useful to have on the shelves? Does it help with curriculum delivery? Which subjects would benefit from using this book? Are there offensive stereotypes present? I look at the physical condition of the book. Are the pages discoloured? Are there scribbles inside? Are the pages ripped? If the pages are ripped, how badly ripped are they? Is it possible to repair the rips? Is it worth the time and the cost of the book tape to repair? Will the repaired book still be attractive and alluring for students to continue borrowing? Is there water damage? Before weeding, I ran a report of the most popular books borrowed in the school library. I ask myself, when was the last time this book was borrowed by a student? How likely are students to borrow this book now? Are they not borrowing this book because it no longer holds appeal, or that it was too difficult to find or not promoted enough by the teacher-librarian? If it wasn't promoted enough, should it be a title or an author that needs more promotion? What if, in my case because my library actively participated for years in the OLA Forest of Reading program, I have multiple copies of the same title? How many titles of the same book should be kept? What if the book is autographed? What if the book is autographed but in bad condition? Which factor takes precedent? This is what the R and S sections looked like after I had finished my deselection process.

Sometimes when methodically deselecting, you find books and wonder how on earth they remained in the collection. Here are a few of those WTH titles I found last week.

I didn't agonize over removing these books; it was easy. Gus Was a Real Dumb Ghost was published in 1982 - 41 years ago. On the first page, Gus uses a typewriter to compile his memoirs. I last used a typewriter in high school, and I'm old. The title character is mocked for not knowing how to spell and is failed by his teacher. "Dumb" is currently not a recommended term to use to describe people, as explained in this Thesaurus article. (Controversy has surrounded the Dav Pilkey series Dumb Bunnies for similar reasons but the term there is used as satire.)

The Christmas Strangers was published in 1976. We have plenty of Christmas-themed books and this one didn't add to the collection in a significantly positive way. My Puppy is also similarly old, battered, and the illustrations no longer hold appeal. As the CSL guide says, "it is important to consider the quality and relevance of the illustrations and design elements that either increase or decrease the appeal of the book". 

I was looking for the oldest book still on the shelf and the image above might be it. Emmett's Pig was published in 1959, 13 years before even I was born. Apologies to author Mary Stolz, but we didn't keep this title after I took the photo. 

I have finished A-F and M-Z, so I still have G-L to go, plus the graphic novel collection, and after that, the guided reading room that isn't attached to the library, but to my knowledge has NEVER been weeded. There is also a huge list of things to consider about dealing with these books once they are deselected. That's a topic for another blog post!