2017 Charleston Library Conference

In summer 2017, Santa Clara University (SCU) Library contracted with OCLC’s Green Glass (part of their Sustainable Collection Services) to provide primary-level collection assessment data to explore our print monograph collection, which had never been systematically weeded. GreenGlass is an automated collection analysis tool that offers libraries a way to measure and visualize collection attributes and filter results by multiple factors, such as date of publication, circulation, and language (https://www.oclc.org/en/sustainable-collections.html). At SCU, our focus was on evaluating our print monograph collection to implement a systematic, “rules-based” weeding project employing automated tools. The use of GreenGlass, which can specifically tailor collection data to agreed-upon parameters, allowed us to avoid one of the stumbling blocks to weeding at SCU - the emotional connections to collections built over time. Since SCU is primarily a teaching-focused university with few post-graduate departments, our constituents’ needs rarely require research-level collections. Historically, SCU library lore makes no mention of any large-scale or organized weeding of print monographs, and our aggregate collection age and redundancy reflected that lack of attention. Based on this need to weed, our research questions for this analysis were focused on the use of the collection and how it serves not only our local users, but our peer and consortial partner libraries. Our analysis needs were met with GreenGlass, since it contains a component for collection comparison to self-selected peer libraries. The results of our new collection analysis paved the way for an efficient and successful weeding project that is currently underway. This poster will share data from GreenGlass showing our “before” weeding and where we hope to be “after.”