I worked in an academic library for several years, from the IT side of things. For the last five, I was heavily involved in "weeding" in a few ways. I think I

I worked in an academic library for several years, from the IT side of things. For the last five, I was heavily involved in "weeding" in a few ways. I think I could go on at length about this manual from a critical aspect, but suffice to say I think it is wildly optimistic, to the point of being pollyannaish. The faculty: the manual ignores the agonizing battles one will have with the faculty over discarding a book that has not circulated in twenty years (note that this circulation number might be incorrect because the faculty member has instructed some hapless grad student to locate the book and then squirrel it away in a locked faculty carrel or perhaps in the ceiling tiles); the faculty will then wish to have each and every book to be removed to be up for debate by each and every member of the faculty. You can imagine how efficient this might be, with each volume treated as if one were callously pitchforking puppies and kittens into some kind of Moloch-furnace. My favorite offender was a duplicate of an index to some other library's special collections that was out of date by a few decades. I say without a trace of exaggeration that faculty will also debate the language used in the process by comparing it to the verbiage of the Holocaust. I may have missed it in my skimming, but I do not see anything about automated tools for comparing the catalog against the union catalog of the libraries in one's own local ILL system. I can find nothing on the long-term strategic outlook. While other libraries are trying to shovel books out the back door and out of sight, others are trying to win Hearts from the other angle by keeping what others would throw away, thereby becoming centers for inter-library loan. Of course, the best code is the code you did not write; similarly, the easiest book to get rid of is the one you did not buy. Acquisitions should be rather tight and yet many libraries blindly pull great palettes of junk from a pre-determined approval list, typically formulated from best-sellers and the like, which results in your science fiction section being inundated with various Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and WH40k issues, starving out the rest. These circulate early and then not at all. Acquisitions are filled with these trivial mistakes which accumulate in the calculus of time. I could go on and on about this, but the manual could use a more cynical approach to better effect.