Chesterfield Public Library

At the Chesterfield Public Library my participation in the weeding process began on April 2. Some weeding had taken place prior to my first day there as they were in the midst of converting their holdings to the online catalog. The point was to get me in there as quickly as possible so that I could start pulling books before they were entered and thereby save time, energy and space. Two major projects going on at the same time! Helpful hint: try to avoid that craziness if at all possible.
I worked on non-fiction focusing on keeping basic materials relevant to the area and getting rid of out-of-date materials especially in health and topical issues. Young Adult and Children's are together and there it was a matter of condition, interest, timeliness and doing away with duplicates. One of my final tasks is to go through boxes and boxes of donations and decide which ones to add to the collection. Everything else, along with the discards will go to the book sale in September. Anything still remaining at that point will be given to GotBooks.
Chesterfield library serves a rural community and is not too far from Williamsburg and Northampton. Cindy, the library director, does a very good job of maintaining her collection with, as in most libraries, limited time and resources. We agreed almost totally on what should be kept or discarded. Again I was surprised at how well she knew her user's reading interests and how personable her interactions were with them. I'm thinking that maybe I am finally adjusting to this immense difference of small vs. large city library way of doing things.
In a couple of more visits I will be finished and it is going to be hard not going there every week. But it's time to move on and help at Tyringham.