Westfield Library Right-sizes Collection, to Add More Space for Meeting Rooms

As you may recall, Westfield Memorial Library hired professional consultants from Library Development Solutions in 2020 to evaluate the library and make recommendations for improvement. Their space assessment, and later the library’s 2021-2024 strategic plan, called for reducing the overall size of the library’s collections to better serve Westfield residents.

In 2023, we joined a shared services consortium STELLA (formerly LMxAC), which enables us to provide Westfield residents with more materials (approximately 3,000,000), while physically storing fewer items in our library building. Our current physical collection consists of more than 160,000 items, but determining the appropriate size of a collection for a given library is not easy.

To figure this out, we took a list of the 300 public libraries in New Jersey and narrowed it down to the six libraries that are closest to Westfield in terms of population served and building square footage. One of the first things we noticed was that Westfield’s collection size was 32% larger than the average of those six other libraries. You might think this is because our materials are used more than those libraries. But our circulation (the measure of how often library materials are used) was actually 29% lower. This aligns with the general trend that the more focused (or well-weeded) a library collection is, the more it is used.

Another way to look at this is in terms of collection efficiency (circulation divided by the number of items in the collection). When compared to the other six libraries, Westfield’s collection efficiency (1.0) was almost half the average (1.9).

As we work to improve library services for the Westfield community, it’s critical that we ensure both our space and collections are as efficient as possible. Over the course of the next few years, we will be reducing the overall size of our collection to approximately 127,000 (or roughly 20%). When we get there, we will still be tied for the largest collection among similarly sized libraries, but we will have a better collection of materials, and more space to meet the evolving needs of Westfield residents.

Specifically, this will allow us to create seven new study rooms of varying sizes on the library 2nd floor, which will be available to residents to use for study groups, Zoom meetings, job interviews, and more. Work is expected to commence in mid-September and be completed by the end of October.

But how will we reduce the library’s collection by so much? The answer is that we will be removing materials that are not used, including outdated formats like CDs and DVDs, and books that are worn, or haven’t been borrowed in years. We will continue to purchase new books at the same rate (if not a greater rate), but we will be removing materials that Westfield residents do not want or need.

We certainly have a lot of work in front of us, but the result will be a stronger collection of materials, and a better library facility for the Westfield community.

See Right-Sizing Collections for a more detailed reporting on library collection sizes, usage, and targets. This report was requested by the library’s 2021-2024 strategic plan and presented to the library’s Board of Trustees on June 26, 2024.