Most librarians must confront the daunting task of weeding/pruning/deselection the library’s collection. There is a wealth of literature showing that pruning is a win-win-win situation for library patron, collection, and librarian. There is also plenty of information about what kind of principles librarians should employ when evaluating a collection. However, when the rubber met the road, I found that all my research had left me unprepared for some of the practical and logistical challenges. This presentation is intended to show the practical lessons I learned while conducting a major pruning project, which lasted approximately 6 months and resulted in the pruning of more than 12,000 titles. While I learned these lessons in an academic setting, many can be applied in other types of libraries as well.
