Weeding a library collection is never a popular topic on college campuses. Libraries are sometimes quite open about their weeding policies, and sometimes they just hope no one notices.
Faculty sometimes protest and libraries sometimes have to defend their decisions.
Just the other day, I came across a perfect example of why we need to weed our collections: In the reference collection our library had a copy of a spiral bound users guide to Beilstein, the source of a wide variety of organic chemistry information. From 1966.
First, the guide is to the print version of Beilstein, which doesn’t exist anymore (as far as I can tell). Second, we don’t have access to the electronic version of Beilstein.
While this guide might be useful to historians of chemical information services one day, as an undergraduate institution with a constant need for more space in the library, we simply cannot justify hanging onto it.
the Undergraduate Science Librarian 