05/28/2025

By Julie Jurgens, Lake Bluff Public Library, Youth Services Librarian

Even though I grew up on a farm, I have a black thumb when it comes to plants (I’m still sad about my lack of cherry tomatoes the past two summers despite my best efforts), but thankfully when it comes to weeding books, I have much stronger skills.

Some of you might be saying, Weeding books? What does that mean? Well, that’s why I am writing to you today. 

Much like a garden, a library collection must be planned, curated, and maintained. Where a gardener pores through seed catalogs and wanders in greenhouses, librarians pore through professional review journals and wander the (digital) aisles of our book vendors. Where gardeners consider the soil and light in their garden plot as they choose what to plant, librarians consider the shelving space and interests of our community when it comes what to buy.

To keep our shelves looking great and full of materials that Lake Bluff Readers are interested in, we use a variety of tools. One of my favorites is the acronym MUSTIE, which stands for:

• Misleading (meaning, factually inaccurate or out of date)
• Ugly (this one’s really harsh, but it’s for books that have been well-loved and have earned an honorable retirement, or maybe they got dropped in the toilet, or the dog tried to eat it…there’s a lot of gross things that can happen to books)
• Superseded (by a new edition, or a better book on the same subject)
• Trivial (a lot of times pop culture zeitgeist or satirical books can fall in this category, like Goodnight iPad from 2011, when iPads were new and easy to mock)
• Irrelevant (is this something the community needs or wants?)
• Elsewhere (can we get this through interlibrary loan, or as an e-book)

It’s usually an easy call to remove a book that’s no longer accurate or in poor condition, but many times we weed books that are in great shape, but there’s just not an audience for them here in Lake Bluff. This is when we look at the Iin MUSTIE—irrelevant. 

How do we know if a title is irrelevant to our community? One of the first things we look at are statistics. For example, a great way to determine whether or not to keep an item is to look at how many times a title has been checked out, and how recently. If it’s 2025, and an item has been on the shelf since 2015, and the last time it was checked out was 2016, and it only circulated five times total, we can reasonably assume there isn’t demand for this title, and we can remove it from the collection. 

We want to reassure you that these books aren’t just dumped somewhere—we have a multi-pronged approach to remove these items responsibly. Some of these items get put out into the small book sale on the main floor. Others get donated. We also work with a service that takes away our books and finds new homes for them—some are sold, others are donated, and those in poor condition get recycled. 

You might be thinking, But what if someone might want that book someday? You can’t predict the future. You’re right—I can’t predict the future, and sometimes interest does come back for certain titles, say when a movie version is released, or an author dies and interest in all of their work has a resurgence. It’s a tough call to remove certain books, but since we don’t have infinite space in the Lake Bluff Public Library (it would be great if our library were in fact a TARDIS) we sometimes have to say goodbye to books that we feel conflicted about. 

Weeding is something all libraries do on a regular basis, just for routine maintenance. However, at Lake Bluff, we’ve been needing to weed much more than normal recently because  we’ve learned we have too little space in our building for it to be considered compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. As much as we love books, we love making sure our building is accessible for everyone in our community even more, and while weeding our collection to a more appropriate size for our community is part of that, it’s just one small part of larger issues with our building that will need to be addressed in the near future. But every journey begins with one step, and the first step in making our building as useful, beautiful, and accessible as we can, is making sure that our collections are the right size so there’s enough room for everyone in Lake Bluff to visit and find what they need.