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Literary Activism

What Is Weeding and When Is It Not Actually Weeding?: Book Censorship News, August 16, 2024

It's not normal for thousands of books to be weeded at one time, especially in an era of increased book bans.

Kelly Jensen

Editor

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.

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Weeding, sometimes called deselection, is a standard practice by library workers. It is the systematic evaluation of materials in the collection that leads to discarding books that are no longer appropriate. Public and school libraries are not designed to be warehouses. They are thoughtfully curated to the needs of the community in which they serve. Weeding makes the collection easier to browse, ensures that it is up-to-date and that it is relevant to its users — having 16 copies of The Catcher in the Rye in varying degrees of torn apart when the book hasn’t been used in a school curriculum for a decade is a sign of poor library management. Two or three good-condition copies would be more than enough.

Public and school libraries should have their own policies governing their weeding process. This might include assessing items according to the CREW/MUSTIE method, assessing for things like Misleading/factually incorrect material/poor content; Ugly/worn beyond repair; Superceded/there’s a new edition or a better book on the topic; Trivial/of no discernible literary, scientific, or cultural merit; Irrelevant to the needs or interests of the library community (this, in particular, explains why some books are readily available in one library but may not be in a library in another community — the example of Catcher in the Rye fits here, as a school which still uses the book in the curriculum may indeed have a need for those 16 copies to remain on shelf); and finally, Elsewhere/the material is easy to obtain from another library for those seeking it out.

When it comes to fiction, library policy might dictate that books that have not circulated within a period of time will be weeded. For example, a book that was released in 2008 that was really popular for ten years may not have moved since 2018. A policy might state that books that have not checked out in five years would be weeded. That book would be removed unless there was a compelling reason for keeping it, and there might be — professional guides to “core collections” exist and are frequently part of assessing material. Indeed, some books are used primarily or solely within the library and, thus, would not have a circulation record. An example in both public and school libraries might be a puberty book or a book on gender and sexuality; it’s not that they cannot be checked out, but those books might be too embarrassing for a tween or teen to borrow, so they peruse it while at the library.

Library workers also understand there’s a delicate balance when it comes to the popularity of books. If a title is on tap to be weeded because it has not moved since 2018, but there is an upcoming film adaptation, or it has been getting press, the title may stick around because of renewed interest. Even though we know banning books does not increase their sales numbers except in very rare cases and that banning books does not encourage young people to run to shelves to check them out, they do bring about interest. That means those “contentious” titles “weeded” during an era of book banning should come with solid reasoning behind their removal.

Unfortunately, there are still libraries without collection policies or with policies that have either too little guidance or that have not been updated in several years. This makes them vulnerable to book banners, to administration angling to avoid made-up controversy, to quiet/silent/soft censorship, and more. Without a comprehensive, clear, and updated policy, it is easy to make decisions that harm library users. We already know that many book bans in schools are achieved because districts don’t follow (or didn’t have) their own review policies.

So it begs the question of what’s going on when hundreds or even thousands of books are “weeded” in one fell swoop, as has been the case in several libraries over the last few months. When this happens during a rise in book bans, it’s essential to get full, transparent explanations.

Souderton Area High School (PA) removed 3,224 books in June 2023, as discovered this June. Pictures show rows of empty shelves, with the district claiming that the books were all part of the weeding process. Not included on those weeding lists were the reasons why the books were removed — that’s not always a requirement of professional weeding — but among the titles were some that make little to no sense.

There is a weeding policy on the district’s website for school libraries. But when you look at what’s been going on in the district at board meetings and in the community, that huge “weeding” project begins to look suspicious. Souderton’s been plagued by claims of “pornography” and “inappropriate material” in the schools, like so many others in the state and nation. In explaining the excessive weeding, the school district’s superintendent noted that the library was being “reallocated as a student center which includes a business center to support the Pathway 360 program as well as a private space to serve student mental health needs.”

In early 2023, one of the Souderton school board members ran for a state representative position and was elected. Upon taking on that role, she resigned from her position on the board. Her suggestions for who could replace her? Plenty of Moms For Liberty and other far-right candidates; her replacement is exactly one of those, raising further questions about what she and other members of the board dictated happened to the high school library.

Souderton is also located near Pennridge School District, where school board directors secretly banned books for two years. Now, that weeding project looks far more suspicious — removal of more than 3,200 titles through weeding is not common unless the library itself has not been maintained for years.*

So, too, does the 4,000 book weeding project that took place in nearby Manheim Township School District the prior school year. Among those books was Ellen Hopkins’s Identical, a perennially popular book banning target and in the top ten banned titles in the 2022-2023 school year. Low circulation is cited as the reason here — and the number provided by the district checks out — but a heavily targeted book being removed during a contentious time of censorship should not only be questioned but it should be left as-is. It is likely students are reading the book in the library if they fear their parents finding out (and the uptick in bans on the book will bring a resurgence of interest in it).

Another district facing necessary questions about weeding is Sarasota County, Florida. Over a four month period in early 2024, the district “weeded” 80 titles deemed “not age appropriate.” As the Herald Tribune asks, why weren’t those books moved into a more “age appropriate” collection, rather than removed? (To be clear, moving the books would also constitute a type of censorship, but they would still be available in the district).

Worse, in the four months prior to those removals, the district “weeded” an astonishing 13,146 books. There was no reason given for their “weeding,” in part because the cataloging system used by the district did not have that as an option to include. That changed in January.

Again: weeding is normal. But that number is not. A well-maintained collection would not have over 13,000 books needing to be removed, even over an entire school district. The district did not follow their own policies about “weeding,” and they did not follow the process in place to remove books that might have “sexual conduct” within them. Those are only reviewed if a parental complaint is submitted.

And under this paywalled story, students this week demanded that Brevard County Schools (FL) explain what was included in their list of over 103,000 weeded books.

These are but a handful of examples of a legitimate and necessary professional activity library workers do being used in ways that should be questioned and scrutinized. To lay blame in one place, though, would undermine how complex the ongoing battle over books truly is. Are there library workers removing books they worry about causing a problem? They are, and that’s called quiet/soft/silent censorship. Are there library workers being told they need to remove anything potentially problematic by the administration and school boards? An even harder yes applies here. Library workers want to keep their jobs, of course, and in some cases, they might agree with the district’s decision (despite the fact library workers go into the field knowing their role is to defend the rights of all to access materials of interest).

But it shouldn’t be the library workers we question first. It should be the school boards and their makeup. Who is on it? What’s their goal? In an era of rampant mis- and dis- information packaged as a fight for “parental rights,” it’s not a surprise that those without the qualifications or experience in libraries are using policies created by those professionals to undermine their work and deny students their education.

Book Censorship News: August 16, 2024

*In my first career as a librarian, I undertook a huge weeding project in my two-library system because it’s a process that I believe strongly in for the reasons outlined. Even then, I weeded no more than 300-400 books across several categories of those two libraries (and they were primarily history books that were outdated — not teen novels!).