Training Toolkit

Collection Management and Weeding

Collection Development

If you're not familiar with a certain genre of fiction, it can be difficult to know what books to select for it. To help you, below is a list of the major awards for the major genres. Looking at the current and previous winners can provide some direction.

  • Bram Stoker Awards - promoting superior achievement in the Horror genre
  • Carol Awards - the voice of Christian fiction, recognizing the best Christian fiction published by traditional publishing houses
  • Edgar Awards - recognizing the best in Mystery fiction
  • Hammet Prize - promoting literary excellence in the field of Crime-writing
  • Nebula Awards - recognizing the best in Science Fiction and Fantasy 
  • RITA Awards - promoting excellence in the Romance genre by recognizing outstanding published romance novels and novellas
  • Spur Awards - promotes distinguished writing in the Western field
  • Eisner Awards - promoting excellence in Comics and Graphic Novels

Looking for a genre that isn't listed? Check Wikipedia's list of Literary awards by genre and type

Collection Diversity

Diversify your library's collection with these awards, book lists, and resources. 

American Indian Youth Literature Awards - recognizes the best writing and illustrations by Native Americans and Indigenous peoples of North America

Americas Award - recognizes authors, illustrators and publishers who produce materials that portray Latin American, the Caribbean or Lantinx content

Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature - recognizes work about Asian/Pacific Americans and their heritage

Children’s Africana Book Awards - recognizes authors/illustrators and their encouragement of the publication and use of accurate, balance children’s materials about Africa

Coretta Scott King Book Awards - given annually to outstanding African American authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults

Jane Addams Children’s Book Award - recognizes books that engage children in thinking about peace, social justice, global community, and equity for all people

Lambda Literary Awards - recognizes LGBTQ writers

Middle East Book Award - recognizes books for children and young adults that contribute meaningfully to understanding of the Middle East

Pura Belpré Award - presented annually to a LAtino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience

Scholastic Asian Book Award - recognizes children’s writers of Asian origin who are taking the experience of life, spirit, and thinking in different parts of Asia to the world at large

South Asia Book Award - yearly award to call attention to outstanding works on South Asia

Schneider Family Book Award - recognizes an author/illustrator for a book that embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience

Stonewall Book Awards - recognizes LGBTQIA+ books of exceptional merit

Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Children’s Literature - recognizes diverse authors whose works feature diverse main characters and address diversity in a meaningful way

ALA Rainbow List - titles include significant gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer content

Books Matter: Children’s Literature - recommended titles from the Anti-Defamation League

Children’s Peace Education & Anti-Bias Library - curated list of titles to reflect various anti-bias topics

Colours of Us - multicultural book lists

I’m Your Neighbor Book Lists - children’s books that represent newcomer communities

Rich in Color - reviews of young adult fiction starring or written by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)

Stories For All - diverse books and resource project from First Book Marketplace

We Read Too [APP] - mobile directory of books written by authors of color featuring main characters of color

Young Adult Diversity - book lists and collection audit tools

Pest Management

Part of keeping the collection in good shape includes regularly checking materials for pests.

We have a bed bug oven to lend to our member public libraries. For more information, please contact peacelibrarysystem.ab.ca.

A good powerpoint addressing the issue of bed bugs in libraries is Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite: Prevention and Treatment of Bed Bugs in Public Libraries (presentation by Sarah Kittrell).

For preserving the general health of your physical collection, review the IFLA Principles for the Care and Handling of Library Material. 

Shelving

These instructional videos, courtesy of Parkland Regional Library, cover shelving of fiction and non-fiction.

Weeding Resources

View the example weeding reports provided by Jacob Fehr from GPPL:

If you are new at weeding and would like to familiarize yourself with the general principles, a great resource to start with is CREW: A Weeding Manual for Modern Libraries.

Computers/Technology, Law, Medicine & Health, Childcare, and Travel are considered the most time sensitive areas of your non-fiction collection because of the rapid rate that information changes and develops within these topics. Older items quickly become superseded, obsolete or irrelevant. In the case of medical materials, they may even be dangerous. Hence, it is important to make sure that items within these categories in your collection are no more than five years old. Anything older than five years should be replaced with a more current edition.

To help you find resources, we have created tip sheets for each of the categories. Each tip sheet covers what to consider when selecting, call number ranges and keywords to help you search.

Evaluate Your Current Collection
Before starting to purchase new items in the above categories, you may want to evaluate and/or weed your current collection. To do this, you can run a report in SimplyReports that will provide you with the call number, barcode, title, publication date, year-to-date circulation, last circulation date, lifetime circulation and current circulation status of a section of your collection. Download the instructions on How to Run a Shelf List Report in SimplyReports. You can also run the Weeding Report - Simple with Collection Filter in Polaris under Utilities > Reports and Notices > Custom.

Dewey Call Number Ranges
To know which Dewey call number range each of the categories fall under, please download this document.