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Destroyer and Preserver, Hear, Oh Hear! Not All Uncirculated Books Must Chariotest to a Dark Wintry Bed: How We Used the OCLC WorldCat Search API to Inform Our Weeding Decisions with Holdings Data

Weeding a specialized collection, such as the geography/oceanography subset of the marine science collection at the Marine Resources Library, requires thinking beyond our own walls and users. To ensure potential access to weeded items through other libraries, as well as the preservation of items unique to our own collection, we sought an efficient and free means to incorporate national holdings data into our decision‐ making process. The OCLC WorldCat Search API enables bibliographic data, as well as holdings from other libraries, to be obtained easily. With a Python script we obtained holdings data for most of our several thousand oceanography items, making more than 10,000 queries of the API over six minutes. We identified holdings of this collection subset within our five peer libraries, NOAA regional libraries, PASCAL (SC state consortium) libraries, LVIS member libraries, and libraries in the United States to inform (not determine) our weeding decisions. Introduction The Marine Resources Library (MRL), located on James Island, South Carolina, is a collaborative initiative of multiple marine science research agencies. College of Charleston (CofC), South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR) Marine Resources Research Institute (MRRI), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) Charleston Laboratories with participation from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) comprise the stakeholders in the library. No comprehensive deselection (weeding) project appears to have been undertaken in any subject area at MRL for many years. We decided to initiate a trial weeding exercise with a subset of the collection during the fall 2018 semester. The MRL is managed by one CofC librarian and one library technical assistant (LTA). The library functions as a branch library, supported by the infrastructure of the CofC Libraries with financial support from the stakeholders. The current online catalog is Innovative Interfaces Millennium. The circulating collection of approximately 32,000 items includes published books and many technical and project reports from a variety of government agencies. The subject areas of focus are primarily oceanography; marine biology, botany, and zoology; microbiology; and aquaculture and fisheries. NOAA material comprises approximately 15% of the print circulating collection, while CofC and SCDNR own the majority of the collection. Within the MRL circulating collection, 2,936 unique bibliographic records in the Library of Congress Geography category are represented by 3,487 print items. Of these items 2,743 are classified as Oceanography. We chose the Geography subset of the collection for the trial weeding project. Of all print Geography monographs, 3,252 (93.3%) have not circulated since 1/1/2007. Of these, 2,606 Oceanography monographs (93.9% of oceanography titles) have not circulated in the same time period. If deselection were to be determined solely by use, the majority of these items would likely be eliminated. However, as a specialized library with a focus on the southwestern Atlantic states, and particularly on South Carolina, the preservation of material specific to these regions is also part of MRL’s mission. When weeding a collection, various concerns may be raised. What if items are eliminated, and subsequently requested by library users? Who could provide us with a copy if we needed to request one with interlibrary loan? How scarce are the items we are considering weeding? What if region‐ specific historical knowledge is lost from the region? Where does responsibility lie to preserve regional information when no regional strategy is apparent? These concerns inspired us to investigate holdings of other libraries to help inform our weeding decisions. Method We identified select groups of libraries of significance to MRL, the holdings of which we chose to evaluate. Lists were made of OCLC symbols for libraries represented in each group (“Libraries Very Interested in Sharing,” n.d.; “NOAA Library Network,” n.d.;