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.
Looking for a genre that isn't listed? Check Wikipedia's list of Literary awards by genre and type
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 Barbara Johnson at bjohnson@peacelibrarysystem.ab.ca or (780) 538-4656 ext. 109.
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.
These instructional videos, courtesy of Parkland Regional Library, cover shelving of fiction and non-fiction.
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 Older items quickly become superseded, obsolete or irrelevant.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.
Search for Current Titles
Title Source allows users to search for books that fall within a specific Dewey call number range. For example, if you wish to update your Technology section within the Computers category, you would want to search for items within the 004 to 007 call number range.
Dewey Call Number Ranges
To know which Dewey call number range each of the categories fall under, please download this document.