In the Weeds by MG Allan
I was working the circulation desk when I saw the email from headquarters. A message letting all the librarians at our branch know that next month we were scheduled for a “weeding.”
I had worked for the library almost a year, so I was familiar with the term. It meant Collection Management would soon be running a report to identify titles in our collection that hadn’t been checked out in two years or more. Then they would swoop in and remove the books from the shelves, discarding them like unwanted and unloved children.
The first time I went through a weeding, I felt heartbroken as I saw some of the titles that were disappearing from the collection. Many of them books I had read and enjoyed, a few classics that had been instrumental to me developing my love of reading as a younger person. To see them boxed up and carted off left me almost bereft, like I had just witnessed the coroner wheeling out the body of a friend.
Or several.
I knew some of the books would be donated to local used bookstores, but the rest would be sent to a recycling center. Those were the ones that I mourned for the most.
As I sat at my desk now, I could feel the grief preemptively rising up again and I wished there was something I could do to keep these titles in circulation and in the collection. And like the proverbial lightbulb, I suddenly realized there was something I could do. I looked around to make sure no one was paying any attention to me then I ran my own report.
***
That night at home, I sat on my sofa with the laptop on top of my lap and started a group email chain with a dozen people from my book club. Hardcore book lovers like myself who had heard me talk about how painful the pervious weeding had been for me and expressed sympathy.
I attached the report I had run that day and encouraged them all to go through it, identify any books they couldn’t imagine being removed from the collection, and immediately get on the library app and check those books out. That would “refresh” them in the system so they wouldn’t show up on the report Collection Management would soon run.
Once the email was sent, I closed the laptop and looked over at the coffee table. Stacks of almost twenty books formed crooked towers. Before leaving work today, I had made my own list of books I felt had to be saved and checked them all out.
Feeling the warmth of heroism, a knight in shining armor who had rescued a gaggle of princesses from being sacrificed, I snuggled into the cushions and grabbed one of the books from the nearest tower and started to read.
MG Allan is a writer who spent his childhood making up stories in his head and is spending his adult life writing them down.
Photo by Polina Zimmerman at Pexels
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