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Annual Library Book Stock Review 2025

The process and criteria

In a typical year, we might buy around 8,000 new print items. Shelves in some locations are too full to add new books, and retention of unused titles makes it both difficult to find specific books and to browse for titles most likely to be of interest.  

In 2019, we piloted a new approach to withdrawing final copies of low-use books from our libraries and Store. We worked with our academic community to agree a systematic and standard approach to withdrawing material. We repeated the process in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024, and have been delighted with the level of engagement with the listings of items that we shared. To date, academic comments have allowed us to identify more than 9,000 items which, although low-use, remain important for teaching and research.

Criteria

For the 2024-25 review, we will focus on low-use books in Business Library, Denis Arnold Music Library, Djanogly Learning Resource Centre, George Green Library, Greenfield Medical Library, James Cameron-Gifford Library and material held in our off-site Store at King's Meadow Campus. For Hallward Library, the focus is on titles in the Documents Division, Microform and Reference collections. For this material usage data is not readily available, and we'd particularly appreciate your input to confirm if it's still relevant for your teaching and research.

For Hallward Library, we used a combination of library data and national tools to identify titles which match the following criteria: 

• Item held by the Library for more than a certain number of years:  Documents Division (15 years), Microform (8 years) and Reference collection (15 years)
• Item not on a reading list in the online reading list system 
• Item not previously flagged for retention 
• Item also available in 10+ other Research Libraries UK (RLUK) libraries. We have raised this from the usual 7+ because usage of these types of material is difficult to quantity 

For James Cameron-Gifford Library, George Green Library and Greenfield Medical Library, we used a combination of library data and national tools to identify titles which match the following criteria: 

• Item held by the Library for more than 10 years and has 0-1 loans 
• Item not on a reading list in the online reading list system   
• Item not previously flagged for retention  
• Item also available 3+ other Research Libraries UK (RLUK) libraries

For Business Library, Denis Arnold Music Library and Djanogly Learning Resource Centre, we used a combination of library data and national tools to identify titles which match the following criteria: 

• Item held by the Library for more than 10 years and has 0-1 loans 
• Item not on a reading list in the online reading list system   
• Item not previously flagged for retention   
• Item also available 7+ other Research Libraries UK (RLUK) libraries

For Store, we used a combination of library data and national tools to identify titles which match the following criteria: 

• Item held by the Library for more than 10 years
• Item not borrowed for 6 years 
• Item not on a reading list in the online reading list system 
• Item not previously flagged for retention 
• Item also available in 4+ other Research Libraries UK (RLUK) libraries 

The resulting lists of eligible titles are available to colleagues in academic departments until the end of 31 May, a 17 week consultation period. After reviewing all the comments, over the summer vacation we remove or move stock, update the catalogue and reorganise shelf space. 

If you have any questions about the process, please contact the Collections Team.

How to contribute

Colleagues in academic departments are welcome to identify any titles you want us to keep.

1. Please review the listings from the spreadsheets below.
2. If you need more information to inform your decision, copy and paste the item’s NUsearch record number into NUsearch to see the full record details. 
3. Select Yes from the drop-down in the Keep column for any titles that you consider are still relevant and therefore want us to retain.
4. Please add a brief note into the adjacent column explaining why you want it to be kept.

We welcome academic engagement with this process so that collaboratively we can make the right decisions about our collections.

Current listings which meet the criteria