Weeding Out in the Open: What Will the Neighbors Think?

Weeding is often an emotionally charged topic for both librarians and faculty. A healthy print collection needs weeding, but the campus community is often nervous and concerned about this practice. In preparing for a large scale monograph deselection project at California State University, Fullerton’s (CSUF) Pollak Library, library faculty and administration grappled with how to productively and efficiently involve the large CSUF teaching faculty in the weeding process. Library systems staff developed an innovative web‐based tool that enables faculty to easily provide feedback on deselection candidates on a title by title basis. This paper explains the thoughts behind the project, the creation of the deselection database and user interface, how the weeding project was received by teaching faculty, and the results of an initial pilot.