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50 Law Libr. J. 6 (1957)
Weeding a Law Collection

handle is hein.journals/llj50 and id is 16 raw text is: Weeding a Law Collection by ERWIN C. SURRENCY, Librarian Temple University Law Library One of the most persistent problems of law library administration is that of shelf space and arrangement of books on the shelves. Although some libraries will deny the existence of this prob- lem, surveys have shown that most li- braries have reached ninety-five per cent or more of their total shelf ca- pacity. Since more and more is ap- pearing in print each year, the seri- ousness of this problem will continue to increase. The scholar has just so much time to examine source ma- terials, the result being that a great mass of printed material will receive little or no use. However, this is not a problem for the individual librarian. On the other hand, the law librarian can do something about the many use- less volumes occupying valuable li- brary shelving space and should adopt a policy for the consistent weeding of the book collection. A great many useless books which could be discarded without any injury to scholarship are occupying the shelves of libraries. Multiple copies of old texts and replaced volumes of the digests are all gathering dust on some shelves, just to mention a few species of books which should be sold for waste paper. Many of these items are kept in the name of scholarship, what- ever that term means in twentieth- century America, but in reality they could be discarded without injury to the research quality of the library. In view of the high cost of erecting a new building, to say nothing of maintaining a library, a solution to the problem of the ever-increasing number of books must be sought by the library profession. The mere sta- tistics of the library's collection do not constitute sufficient justification for erecting a new building, unless those statistics represent usable books, in- cluding books which are preserved for scholarly use. One of the duties of a librarian should be the periodic ex- amination of the library collection with a view to discarding those ma- terials which are of no further value. Discarding materials from the li- brary collection is an unalterable act which may have grave consequences for the library in the future. Many li- brarians can tell of incidents where their predecessors discarded the tenta- tive drafts of the Restatement of the Law once they were adopted in final form on the theory that the final Re- statement had all the materials in the tentative drafts! Now their successors are finding it difficult and expensive to purchase new sets of this material, to say nothing of the time involved in the search. Knowledge of books is all- important to the librarian. When considering a weeding policy, the future of the library should be kept firmly in mind and a plan for its

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