What's on your "Hot Picks" shelf?

I was just reading the Washington Post article about the aggressive weeding campaigns of some libraries. One library generates a list of items that haven't circulated in 24 months and asks librarians to determine which of those should be weeded. Another library library sets a lifetime circulation goal (an item must have circulated at least 20 times during its [presumably] long lifespan at the library.

That's all well and good until the items being weeded are classics. Especially if the classics are being replaced by popular literature or DVDs.

Rather that weeding classics and having them sold by the Friends, libraries need to think about their long-term responsibilities and some of the options that make it possible to save those great classics. Here's some ideas:

1) Display some of the classics with your "Hot Picks."

One of the reasons people don't pick up those classics is because no one is marketing them. If they weren't just released or just made into a major motion picture, most people aren't going to know about them. Why not incorporate some of the old classics into your library's Hot Picks and see if they start circulating then! That's what Diane Kresh, Arlington County's library director (according to the article) is doing. It's unclear from the article whether Diane is slipping the classics in with the more recent books or if she's highlighting them as "forgotten classics." I recommend the former. Just slip them in there! They're classics, they won't be disappointed.

2) Use off-site storage for important but under-circulating items.

Library shelf space costs a fortune and not everything needs to be browsable. But that doesn't mean we should be tossing out the great stuff to make way for titles that will only be meaningful for six months. We have to find a balance. I urge libraries to work together to establish shared off-site storage for their system's classics or historical material. Combine the off-site storage with direct delivery service (UPS direct to your home) and you're golden! Take a lesson from the Tri-University Group of Libraries. They established off-site storage for low circulating items but don't keep any duplicates. Just one copy of each title. Perfect.

3) Use floating collections.

The better libraries are at moving materials between libraries and into the hands of customers, the less important it is to worry about ownership. Libraries that have shared catalogs and freely move materials around their system or consortium spend far too much money returning items only to have them go right back out due to a Hold Request. Stop that! When an item is returned to your library, check it in right there and make it ready to circulate again. There's a good chance that as soon as you check it in, you'll see that someone has put a Hold on it anyway. Save that book the trip back to its home library and save all of us some money.

4) Prepare for downloadable movies.

Eventually libraries will be able to circulate movies to patrons without the DVD case taking up space because our customers will be downloading them from the library website. Or perhaps they'll be putting them on Hold and picking up a 'just burned DVD' that staff put on the Holds shelf. Right now movies are bought and sold as physical DVDs but eventually libraries will be buying rights to a title through relationships with companies like eztakes.com. Eztakes buys movies on VHS and DVD from regular folks (in other words they buy each person's rights to a movie) and then make them available as downloadable DVDs. Eventually someone will contract with a company like eztakes and make it cheaper to deliver items via download than via a commercially packaged DVD.

5) Reduce browsable stacks in the library and provide higher density shelving in the back office.

The better the discovery tools are, the less important physically browsing the library shelves is. When books are out on the public shelves, it is impossible to shelve them efficiently: ADA compliant walkways; underutilized bottom and top shelves; shelves that are only five feet tall when the ceiling is 15 feet away. While these are all important considerations for the public areas and they make for a really nice place to be, it doesn't make for efficient storage of books. We have to start thinking about what items need to be in our beautiful, inviting public spaces and which can be stored in the back in high density shelving or instantly retrievable with an automated retrieval system like the one in use at Sonoma State University.

Those are just some ideas that occurred to me as I read the above article in which books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" were put up on the chopping block. While I'm all for providing material that the public wants to read, let's not throw out the baby. The public is reacting to marketing and that's a large part of what determines what is circulating. Let's do our own marketing of the books we know are great and timeless. Let's make sure those classics (or at least one copy) has a place to live so we can get it to our customers when they realize how much they'd love to read it.