Mission Accomplished!

JKM Librarians Finish EPRC Weeding

No — really! Last Friday 13 June Bill Beermann, Emilie Pulver and Chris Wenderoth announced that they had completed their 21-month-long project of weeding and the retro-con of the Educational Practices Resource Collection (aka EPRC, located at the north end of the second floor of the library). Huh? you might be asking. Spare me the library mumbo-jumbo: what exactly does that mean?

Weeding is an ever-ongoing process in libraries by which the professional staff (the gardener, if you will, and in this case, Chris) decides whether or not to retain a book, journal, audio recording, video, etc. in the collection. Unlike the Emersonian weed (“Any plant whose virtues have not been discovered”) a weeded item from a library collection is one whose virtues have grown dated, out of scope, or —by virtue of its mere existence — is crowding out space for other, more desirable, items. To weed the EPRC Chris evaluated every item for currency, whether or not it belonged in the collection, or whether it even belonged in JKM. Some items stayed in the EPRC, others moved to the general collection, and others were consigned to, well, the place where deacessioned books go.

After Chris had decided the fate of each and every item in the EPRC, Bill and Emilie began their work of recataloging (aka, “retro-con”), reclassifying or deacessioning. For all of its history at JKM, the EPRC has had its own (to continue the gardening analogy) home-grown description and classification system, unlike the other half-million or so items in the stacks described and arranged using Library of Congress standards. Working with curriculum (which comprises a significant portion of the EPRC), videos (both cds and dvds) and children’s literature presents significant challenges for a cataloger (if you want to know more, talk with Bill or Emilie). When the project was finally completed: