Library and Information Science Commons^™

Separating The Wheat From The Chaff: Intensive Deselection To Enable Preservation And Access, Colleen Hoelscher, Jillian Ewalt

Colleen Hoelscher

In 2014, the Marian Library at the University of Dayton completed a long overdue revision of its collection development policy. The new document more clearly defined the scope of the library’s collections, and was intended to guide new acquisition decisions. However, this new document had the unexpected benefit of providing a framework for deselection projects that enabled preservation and improved access to the collections.

This paper will discuss and analyze two of these projects, and demonstrate how the revised collection development policy laid the foundation for successful deselection outcomes. In the first case study, legacy collections of genre-based ephemera were …