Letter from the Dean on the Deselection Process
Posted April 22, 2022
To our patrons,
Over the last few years, the faculty and staff of Library and Information Sciences have been engaged in a wholesale reinvention and transformation of Lovejoy Library. A number of things have been happening simultaneously. Various other units have been welcomed into Lovejoy Library: the Honors Program offices, the Faculty Development Center, and part of the Writing Center. In conjunction, the primary physical collection of Lovejoy Library has been examined and ‘weeded.’ ‘Weeding,’ or deselection, is a process of intentionally removing a large number of physical books or documents. The deselection process was complicated and labor-intensive. It is not an end in itself, but a necessary step toward a reinvigorated library, one that is at the center of the academic life of the campus.
When you come to Lovejoy Library, you will see a library that is changing itself and that is what libraries do. In order to be dynamic sites for emancipatory exploration, discovery, learning, and invention, libraries have to metamorphosize. They are historical, dynamic institutions; they are not—and have never been—static. They change over time because both the content, structure, and contours of knowledge and the dominant forms of media change over time. We should remember that libraries are not ‘warehouses of books;’ they don’t look just like unique and rare books reading rooms that are popular on Instagram. As knowledge changes, librarians regularly curate the physical and electronic holdings of libraries. Deselection is a routine process in libraries.
Now, it is true, that there is something unusual about what has been happening in Lovejoy and that is the scale of the deselection. Deselection at scale was necessary because of the particular history of the development of the physical holdings of Lovejoy Library. Since I am a historian, you will forgive me for telling you a little of the story.
It is important to understand a number of things about Lovejoy’s primary physical collection. It numbered approximately 588,000 volumes in 2019. Much of that collection had not been intentionally developed. It was the product of gifts and large-scale institutional acquisitions. A substantial portion of it was never catalogued. Approximately 20% of it was damaged or moldy. Fully 68% of the collection had never circulated. Its average age was over 50 years (that is to say, the book was acquired around 1967). Large parts of the physical collection were out-of-date and, in some cases, embodied expressions of social and cultural standards that are now seen to be prejudicial, without having any offsetting historical or scholarly value.
Not surprisingly, the library faculty and staff, in dialogue with faculty around the campus, determined that such a collection was misaligned with the needs and goals of the university in the second decade of the Twenty-First Century. This misalignment was signaled in a number of ways. For example, the borrow to loan rate of Lovejoy Library was (and is) substantially out of balance (this is the ratio of our requests to other libraries through inter-library loan to their requests from our library). Healthy academic libraries should be lending approximately the same number of books as they are requesting from other libraries and the ratio should be around 1. In 2019, Lovejoy’s borrow to loan rate was 1.75. That means that we are borrowing substantially more books than we are lending to other libraries. This imbalance signals a collection that is out of date, insufficiently funded, and/or fundamentally imbalanced to the needs of its core patrons. These problems were identified internally and then confirmed by an external review of LIS that was conducted in 2019 by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). These internal and external evaluations were the impetus for the major deselection project that has been undertaken.
After that internal review of usage and circulation statistics by the LIS faculty and staff in AY2015/16, the deselection project was piloted with small ranges in 2017 to determine feasibility, process, necessary labor, and time. The basic rules that were developed were that all books that were published, acquired, or circulated in the last 6 years would be kept. In AY18/19, the LIS developed lists of ranges to be deselected for faculty in units; at the same time, the LIS dean and other librarians discussed the project at a variety of levels, down to, in some cases, specific departments. The deselection lists were provided to departmental faculty with the intention that faculty could elect to keep books that they deemed valuable to their discipline, teaching, or research. There were disparate levels of engagement with this process across the campus. As lists were returned, careful attention was paid to what should be kept outside the basic parameters of the project. The project was slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. It was accelerated in 2021, by the new dean, Lis Pankl; extra help was hired. The deselection process was completed last month in February 2022. There are now approximately 155,000 physical volumes in the primary, circulating holdings of Lovejoy Library.
That story brings us back to the present and what you see in Lovejoy Library: a work-in-progress. The completion of the large-scale weeding project lets us begin the next step of its reinvention. The next step is to conduct an inventory of the primary circulating collection; an inventory is a reconciliation of what is on the shelves with the catalogue records. It is itself a complex process that I will describe subsequently, in the coming weeks.
By undertaking these major projects, we are resetting the foundations of Lovejoy Library. We are committed to making Lovejoy Library the central site of student academic success while simultaneously supporting the teaching and research missions of the faculty. The timing of these projects has been a little off: we have been slower than we would have hoped. You’ll forgive us, I hope. Like you we have been doing all of the things you have been doing: reinventing our practices to survive and thrive during the pandemic. We are setting up the procedures and workflows for the inventory right now.
I want to thank the dedicated faculty, staff, extra help, and student workers who carried out the deselection project. They have set the stage for LIS’s future.
We invite you to request books that you need for your teaching and research and we will, within the parameters of a finalized collection policy, acquire them. Beyond that, we will keep you informed about the next stages of the reinvention of Lovejoy Library and will work collaboratively and collegially with the university faculty and other stakeholders to build its future.
Sincerely
Eric W. Ruckh, Ph.D.
Interim Dean, LIS
