A large-scale project to update the materials in the Peabody Veterans Memorial High School library has been underway for several months, reducing the collection’s average age by nine years, according to Library Media Specialist Julie Pease.
Peabody School Committee Member Beverley Griffin Dunne briefed the committee on the project’s progress at last Tuesday’s meeting. Members unanimously approved designating the outdated books as surplus.
The surplus books were first offered to the Peabody Institute Library, which declined to take them. They will now be made available to students and teachers. Any remaining books will be donated to Savers, where they will be sold, with proceeds benefiting the junior class.
“The books are still working for us, all the way out the door, and it’s a great thing because they’re not going to waste,” Dunne said.
When Pease arrived at the high school in the 2022-23 school year, one of her first tasks was to run a diagnostic on the overcrowded shelves to determine the collection’s average age. The result was 1996.
“This confirmed for me that I needed to sort through the over 21,000 books in the collection and get rid of what was outdated, unused, and/or falling apart,” Pease said. “There is a saying that you eat with your eyes first, and this is also true when students are choosing books.”
Nonfiction books were especially outdated, with an average publication year of 1991, while reference books dated back to 1985 on average. These dated materials discouraged students from using those sections or trusting the information they found.
Next came the challenging task of going through the entire collection to determine what books needed to be removed, a process called weeding.
Pease followed the district’s library policies and relied on the CREW manual—a key guide for librarians—to decide which materials to keep or discard.
“It has taken me about two years to weed the entire collection while also completing my other duties as a high school library media specialist,” Pease said. “Doing this all by hand allowed me to simultaneously weed the collection and take a complete inventory.”
The project also uncovered bits of Peabody’s history, including century-old books.
“She even found a book from the 1920s, and I said to her, ‘Did it say Kirstein Library on that?’ and she said, ‘Yes, it did,’” Dunne said. “I explained to her the Kirstein Library was at the original high school, and that those books had come over.”
Pease noted the unexpected number of books on the medieval period in the collection, as well as a more recent blast from the past: a book on the MTV show The Real World: New Orleans.
With the project nearing completion, Pease has already seen its benefits. The library’s nonfiction shelves are now free of outdated knowledge that could misinform students.
“Students used to look at these shelves, see all the old and dusty books, and move on without looking through that section at all,” Pease said. “There would be times that I would have to caution a student that the book they wanted to check out was most likely outdated. That is not the case anymore.”
