I Ga-ron-tee it!

Here's a little Library 101 for those of you not in the business:

One of the basic tasks of librarians is something called "Weeding". This is the process in which you go through the collection and withdraw items that are damaged, out of date and/or unnecessary duplicates. Libraries are constantly running out of space and have to accommodate new materials by selectively getting rid of the old ones.

Even in this new building we have moved into, weeding is necessary. We're currently doing a thorough run through of the nonfiction books and getting rid of items that fall into one or more of the above mentioned categories. There are a lot of stuff that are easy enough to get rid of. There are also a number of items that you just can't let go.

To the former category was How to get your dream job using the Internet by Shannon Bounds and Arthur Karl. To be sure, we get a lot of use out of our employment section, and this book was still in decent shape. However, the fact that the copyright was 1996 (!) is probably a mark against it. Did I mention it had accompanying software?

To the later was something I found in the cookbook section. Though these are also popular, we always seem to have way more than necessary and it's therefore a tempting weeding target. When I came upon one that was worn, had a plain cover and a copyright of 1982, I was tempted to withdraw it. Then I saw the title: Kosher Creole Cookbook by Mildred L. Covert and Sylvia P. Gerson.

That, my friends, is the kind of material that makes this job so cool.