Weeding the Shared NetLibrary Collection

  By Nancy Golz, CCL-EAR Committee Chair

The CCL-EAR committee has been busy this spring semester working on a new process for reviewing and weeding the shared NetLibrary collection. The new process allows us to consider titles for removal on a more frequent and ongoing basis from the shared titles in the collection. The CCL-EAR committee previously completed two deselection projects of the shared EBSCO NetLibrary e-book collection with the collective expertise of our community college librarian colleagues in 2015 and 2021. The good news is that Pawel Szponar, our network zone manager, is now able to delete outdated titles at the network level, and then communicate directly with EBSCO to have them removed from the EBSCO database as well.

A common reason for suggesting that an e-book should be weeded from the collection might be if the book contains outdated information or terminology. The form to suggest a title for deletion is located on the CCL-EAR website.

Requests may be submitted at any time, and the CCL-EAR will review the suggested deletions at their regularly scheduled meetings. In order to give the CCL-EAR committee members time to review the suggestions, only titles received two weeks prior to the scheduled meeting will be considered at that meeting.  Before any titles are deleted from the shared collection, the CCL-EAR chair will send out a list of the titles through the CCL listserv to allow member libraries the chance to review and appeal any specific titles that they think should be kept in the shared collection.

We have already received the first suggested titles through the new form, and the CCL-EAR committee reviewed these titles at our April meeting. I will be sending a list of the titles that are planned for deletion in May. If you have additional suggestions for books that should be considered for deselection from the shared collection of over 27,000 titles, we invite you to submit them through a brief form. Thank you helping us to keep our shared e-book collection current and useful!

Thank you to those who responded to our recent CCL-EAR survey. We are carefully reviewing your responses.  If you have any additional databases that you would like CCL-EAR to review, please let me know. 

We wish you are successful end to the semester!

Dr. Nancy Golz
CCL-EAR, Chair
Faculty Librarian
Merced College
nancy.golz@mccd.edu