Weeding film and film canisters
Hello everyone,
I have approximately 50 canisters of film. They have not been used in over four years and I doubt if they ever will be again. Only one or two have any kind of archival value--the rest are essentially useless. I would like to discard them but do not know of an appropriate procedure.
My question: Is anyone else in this situation? If so, how are you discarding these items?
Thanks ~ Barbara
- Barbara Palmer's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Comments
Weeding Dead Media Formats
Hi Barbara,
Very good question! Here are my random thoughts (for what they're worth)...
While we don't have any film canisters to discard, I often agonize over the best way to dispose of materials that no longer have any purpose (dying formats like floppy disks, or CD-ROMs that don't run on newer operating systems). If they don't sell in the library's book sale, they typically go into the garbage (or recycle bin if possible). In terms of procedure, I check with a faculty member in the relevant department (or make an executive decision if it is quite obvious), get the OK to discard, have the records removed from the catalogue, stamp the items as discarded, try to sell them in the book sale (this is one more chance for faculty to over-rule our decision), then chuck them (or recycle) of they don't sell.
I think with all of the evolution in formats over the past ten years there is a lot of large-scale weeding that could take place in many of our libraries. I'd be interested to know if any libraries have policies for weeding based on format. Maintaining equipment to view these dying formats can be expensive balanced against the amount of use they get, and unless the content is unique, I'm not too keen on becoming an archive. I'd be very curious to hear other people's thoughts on the issue.
Cheers!
Dan