Weeding with a Vengeance: Music CDs

I hadn't appropriately weeded the music cds since starting my tenure here at LPL. It's not something I have a huge budget for and much of that budget has been siphoned off by Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers, High School Musical, and replacements. Children's music cds, as with many other children's things, get used and broken pretty regularly. Not a horrible fact but hard on the cd budget.

But then, as we looked at budgets last week and a little migration of some funds, we found some moveable money for my sad little section--and so it was time to weed and replace.

I spent six hours on Monday crouched, sitting, squatting, hunching--choose your verb--over our low blue bins full of music cds. I filled half a bin with "weed", buried my desk under "try to replace" and filled another bin with "send to the branches." The ones that landed on my desk were ones that had circulated more than 50 times--Mary Poppins had circulated 101 and 104 times on the respective copies. Time for new ones!!!

With sore back I retreated to my desk and made an executive decision. If it had circulated more than sixty times and I couldn't replace it, with a few exceptions, it was being weeded. There is enough children's music to be had without sending out scratched cds or leaving them sitting on the shelf looking grungy. We are, after all, magpies all of us--looking for what is new and shiny.

I hadn't really thought about how badly the music section needed to be weeded until Aide Miss S showed up behind my shoulder around five p.m. and exclaimed how much better it looked. This followed by Aide Mrs. D on Tuesday, who popped in to tell me how fabulous the music section looked and how much easier it was to shelve. Okay, got it, hint taken. Should have weeded a while ago.

At present I'm almost through the cd piles that were on my desk--then I need to go through the CDs that have come back in the last two days (16" pile) and check them against my list. (Then Aide Miss S gets to shelve those--she'll be SO thrilled.) Finally I have to go through my giant list and see what's out that I need to put on hold to weed or replace and what's missing. I think we may not have a good sense of what's gone and I'm about to have a great big trace list.

Back to the trenches.