Learning to Let Go: Weeding for Sustainability in a Mature Repository

Weeding isn’t just for print collections. As repositories mature, organizational complexity can creep in and collections become orphaned, irrelevant, or embarrassing to stakeholders or the host institution. Eleven years after launching our Digital Commons-based repository, Georgia Southern Commons, the University Libraries at Georgia Southern University have embarked on a wide-ranging audit of over 1,900 collection and community structures and over 150,000 items. This project has been complicated by the fact that Digital Commons provides no direct means of visualizing collection and community hierarchies or how records are collected across structures. During this session, presenters will share how we’ve overcome these limitations to understand the structure and content of these collections so that we can weed content we no longer wish to support, as well as simplify the organizational structure of the repository overall. While letting go can be hard to do, the long-term sustainability of repositories may depend on learning how.