Beginning in fall 2025 Feinberg Library will serve as the physical library for Clinton Community College and will incorporate the current print collections of Clinton’s Douglas Library. Feinberg will receive 14,000 recent and relevant books from Douglas to be incorporated into our stacks. The gift is Feinberg’s largest and most significant in memory.
This acquisition will enable Feinberg Library to undertake an overdue review of its print resources. The library will remove our most outdated, unused, and damaged materials, which will make the collection more relevant and browsable.
Feinberg will maintain a robust print collection. In addition to the books we are receiving from Clinton Community College, our librarians continue to purchase books appropriate to the curriculum. Faculty and staff are also welcome to suggest a purchase at any time. We buy nearly all materials requested by our faculty and staff.
Feinberg Library is committed to ensuring that all faculty, staff, and students have access to the resources they need to be successful. We have started with an initial set of criteria but welcome feedback on specific items. Therefore, we are asking for input on materials that we have chosen for deselection.
For each area of the collection we will provide a list of books meeting our initial criteria and a form by which you can ask for particular books to remain in the stacks.
To help you visualize what will remain in the collection even after a weed we are marking books selected for weeding with small yellow dots on the spine. Please visit the stacks to see the deselection candidates in the context of the larger collection.
We ask that faculty and staff consult our spreadsheets of weeding candidates and provide feedback using the form below. Both require authentication via CAS.
Feedback for the E, N, and PR classes is due Friday, December 5, 2025.
E (United States history)
N (Fine arts)
PR (British literature)
As of October 26, librarians are still marking the weeding candidates in the Ds in order to compile a final list of weeding candidates. That spreadsheet will be posted when available.
Feinberg Library considers age, condition, relevance, past usage, and ease of access in the deselection process. For this project, we are only weeding materials that are more than 45 years old, have not been used in 20 years, are not considered essential, and are still held by another SUNY library.
To be more specific, all books considered for deselection fail to meet any of the following criteria:
Though we intend to weed the entire collection, we are starting with those areas that have the least room to grow and in which Clinton’s library was the strongest.
Deselection began in summer 2025, when with the help of the university community we deselected books from the PS classification (US literature).
In fall 2025 and winter 2026 we are weeding the following classes:
In spring and summer 2026 we plan to weed the Fs (History of the Americas) and Ls (Education).
New York state law mandates that materials purchased with state funds must not be given away, neither to individuals nor charities. Therefore, books deaccessioned as part of this process must be discarded. Thanks to the Green Grant program, Feinberg Library has acquired a book despiner in order to allow us to recycle the paper in books.
