Summer Projects at the NJIT Library

Summers are always slow for public service academic librarians since only a small number of students take classes.  Very few people approach the reference desk with questions.  This leaves us time to work on some projects in preparation for the new academic year in September.  Below are two major projects.

1. Weeding - there are thousands of books that have not circulated in years.  Sci-tech books often become dated within a few years.  Since NJIT is not a library of record, we are justified in de-accessioning older and little used materials.  I am going into the stacks in my areas of responsibility and weeding books that are duplicates or are in poor physical condition.  A colleague found notes from the Milwaukee School of Engineering stating that all items selected for withdrawal should be placed in a storage area for one year before discarding.  This may be difficult since we have little room that can be used for storage.

2. Revising the profile for patron driven acquisitions of electronic book.  For one year we had a pilot project where we placed about 28,000 e-books in our catalog that users could borrow.  After a book was borrowed  6 times the library would purchase the book.  This was a successful venture for both the patrons and the library.  We would have to pay much more money to purchase all the book borrowed by our patrons.  The only downside was that we spent more money than we originally anticipated.  Over the summer we have spent time revising the subject profile that we used during the first year.  We are also dropping publishers of books not appropriate for our collection.