A Gold Standard Tool for Library Weeding Was Quietly Shut Down
In 1976, the Texas State Library and Archives Commission developed the CREW Method. The CREW Method, as rendered in the CREW Manual, is a guide to determining where and how to weed materials from library collections. Librarians saw a need to create a systematic framework that was adaptable and flexible enough to meet the needs of libraries both big and small. Many small libraries don’t have a degreed librarian working within them, and even if they do, it’s often not with full-time hours. Library workers today have enough difficulty accessing professional development and educational opportunities with limited time and funds. In a pre-digital age, even finding a library community was difficult for small and mid-size libraries.
Weeding materials in libraries is a standard practice. It’s especially important in public and school libraries, where the purpose of a collection isn’t comprehensive and historical materials housing. They aren’t archival repositories. The purpose of the collections in these libraries is to meet the contemporary needs of a community, and weeding also helps with the realities of space constraints. Buildings can only hold so much.
Libraries generally have collection management policies that include where and how they make decisions with weeding.* Good policies name the tools used to evaluate and remove materials–CREW is among the most common, but other tools are out there as well. Another tool that I encountered when in libraries used the supplement books initially pulled for CREW evaluation were EBSCO’s Core Collections series.The Weeding Handbook by Rebecca Vnuk, published through ALA Editions, is another tool librarians turn to for this work.
CREW Method stands for Continuous Review, Evaluation, and Weeding. Within the CREW Method is another acronym, MUSTIE, a heuristic for where and how to determine whether a book and the information within it has run its course. It stands for:
Misleading – information is inaccurate or intentionally misleading, including mis- and dis- information
Ugly - the material is in poor shape, which means it might be discarded permanently if not being used or it will be replaced with a newer copy
Superseded - there’s a new edition of the book or there’s a book with better or more accurate information on the topic
Trivial - there’s not literary or scientific merit to the title, as it was something purchased when said material was popular. An example here might be all of the various iterations of Chicken Soup for the Soul books–they were super in vogue for a while, but now, not so much. Libraries would likely keep one or two of the best circulating copies and choose to weed the others if they’re no longer popular in the community
Irrelevant - the book no longer meets the needs of your community
Elsewhere - you can find the material elsewhere. This is a useful criteria if you’re choosing to weed, say, a work of classic literature that hasn’t checked out in 10 years but that you can get it through interlibrary loan for a patron who is interested in it down the road.
The CREW Manual isn’t a how-to. It provides questions and considerations for library workers who are doing collection maintenance. There are no library police who come if library workers don’t follow the guide or who find it helpful in some respects and not others. As noted above, the CREW Method was initially intended to help small libraries, where the full staff may have been one part-time person without a background in librarianship. The CREW Manual kept that same intent at its core through its updates over the decades: to help other librarians do a job that many library workers simply don’t like to do or don’t prioritize in their work days. Weeding is a lot of decision making on the micro and macro scale. Where and how can you balance the needs of the collection with the needs of the community with the ethics and responsibilities that come with ensuring libraries are spaces of intellectual freedom? The CREW Method provided, well, a method.
At the end of May this year, the CREW Method was brought up in the Fifth Circuit Court Little vs. Llano County. Little’s case called to question decisions made by Llano County officials who demanded the removal of 17 books from shelves in Llano County Public Library. Plaintiffs believed their First Amendment rights were curtailed in these book removals, as decisions to remove the titles were not based on any established removal guidelines, any collection management policies, and on the basis of partisan beliefs of officials.
The Fifth Circuit handed Little et al. their first loss in the court system, ruling that library books are government speech and therefore, not subject to the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.** This was a minority-majority ruling, which is important to note. Several who sided with the majority did not sign onto their published opinion.
Page 23 from the majority opinion:
A Texas weeding manual instructs libraries to weed “books that contain stereotyping . . . or gender and racial biases,” “unbalanced and inflammatory items [about immigrations],” and “books that reflect outdated ideas about gender roles.” [. . .] Whatever else one might think of the advice in these guides, it is unmistakably viewpoint discrimination. And, by the plaintiffs’ account, all of it violates the First Amendment. That cannot be the law.
And onto page 49:
Today, public libraries convey the same message to the reading public. True, the message’s content has changed: what today’s Library Board thinks is worth reading is likely not what the Petersborough Town Council thought in 1833 nor the Massachusetts Legislature in 1851. But governments – through those who curate collections – still propose which books, in their view, merit the public’s attention. They do so through the unsubtle act of including some books and excluding others.
Just look at the 2012 Texas State Library “CREW” guide. This is the official guide to curating collections in Texas libraries. The practice of weeding and the CREW guide are discussed extensively by the plaintiffs and their amici. Surprosingly, though, plaintiffs portray weeding as entirely non-ideological. They claim weeding is based on “neutral criteria” and “more akin" to maintenance work than intentional control of specific content made available to the public.
But the CREW guide shows the opposite is true. Public libraries are told to weeding the following: “biased, racist, or sexist terminology or views,” “stereotypical images and views of people with disabilities and the elderly, or gender and racial biases,” “outdated philosophies on ethics and moral values,” “books on marriage, family life, and sexuality . . . [are] usually outdated within five years,” “books with outdated [political] ideas,” “biased or unbalanced and inflammatory items [about immigration],” “outdated ideas about gender roles in childrearing,” “art histories . . . [with] cultural, racial, and gender biases.”
The CREW Manual doesn’t make a librarian do anything, no matter how judges choose to frame the purpose of it. It’s there a tool to help in decision making.***
But this isn’t about the Fifth Circuit ruling. At least, not entirely.
Before CREW met the justice system in the Fifth, it was quietly removed from its home at the Texas State Library and Archives website, with a single note: the guide was no longer being updated and would not longer be available on the website.
There are no stories about this on the internet as far as my lengthy searches have shown. No journals nor message boards that are publicly available seem to have addressed the sudden archiving and decision to no longer update this gold standard tool for library collection maintenance. A Reddit user asked in r/libraries where the CREW Manual went three months ago, but there were no answers.
There’s no indication of when the decision was made and the guide was pulled. The only communication about this on the Texas State Library webpage is pictured above.
A search through the Wayback machine does offer some guesses. The CREW manual was available in full to download in December 2024. In January and through mid February 2025, it appears that the website was entirely inaccessible. By late February, the message that’s now on the landing page would appear.
News about the world of libraries at the local, regional, state, and federal level has been nothing less than a firehose over the last several months. It was loud through 2023 and louder in 2024, but the installation of a new federal regime has ramped things up even more.
And while we can’t know why the Texas State Library decided to stop updating the CREW Manual and archive it without them explicitly stating it, conjecture isn’t hard. Texas has been a leader over these last several years in systematic dismantling of their public institutions of democracy, including schools and libraries. The quiet removal of one of the nation’s most referenced tools used for library development is just one more reminder of both how easily it is for good things to slip away quietly and how cowardly some of the institutions who have an obligation to serve their professions truly are.
Did the Texas State Library know that CREW would be subject to a Circuit Court ruling? Possibly. It showed up in previous hearings on the case.
Is the Texas State Library subject to the partisanship being wrought by far-right politicians in a state that has shoved through laws that limit access to books which don’t align with their imaginary white, cishet, able-bodied, male Christian ideal? For sure.
It’s not news that institutions created to support a profession have turned their backs on those professionals and failed to support them in this tumultuous time. But it is deeply disturbing how such a massive institution in such a massive state managed to quietly back down from providing a crucial tool in the fight against misinformation, AI slop parading as worthy library material, and discrimination against those protected by federal civil rights.
Once again, those who’ve been leading the fight against all of this will continue to have more work fall upon them.
Librarians, already widely maligned in this era of false accusations and right-wing conspiracy parading as fact, are having a hard enough time speaking up without fear of retribution. Without fear of losing their jobs. Now they’re in an even shittier position. If they remove the wrong book and can’t point to their policies as to why, guess who’ll get blamed?
The Texas State Library has excused itself entirely and instead, opened the door for exactly this: further harm for individual librarians who either fail their patrons by being complicit or who fail their patrons by not being complicit.
The decision to archive and not update the CREW Method is anything but neutral. It only further underscores how much is at stake in public libraries, especially in Texas, Louisiana, and Missouri, where the recent Fifth Circuit ruling means that any politician has the right to decide what does or doesn’t belong in the library. Actual professional ethics, policies, procedures, an guidelines be damned.
Deprofessionalization has been a goal all along. That it’s being done by an institution purportedly there to help the industry is especially shameful.
Notes
*In this day and age, there are still libraries without these crucial policies that safeguard both the library and its users. Size can no longer be an excuse here–it’s a choice to not have these policies, as much as it is a choice for libraries to continue relying on policies that don’t acknowledge the present realities of censorship and targeted institutional attacks.
**This means that Matt Krause’s slapdash list of 850 books he decided should be pulled from libraries in Texas back in 2021 would be what would need to be pulled in Texas, since he, as a government official, made the decision. Of course, we don’t know what would happen if a librarian said no to this, since the librarian is, by this Court ruling, also a government official. What if, for some unimaginable reason, Texas’s Governor Abbott decided he didn’t think some of the books on the Krause list needed to be banned? There’s nothing here about who has the actual final say among government officials.
***These two statements are a reminder of the need for professional librarians–they know how to do their job as librarians–and a reminder of why such a guide like the CREW Manual is useful both for those who are “trained,” as in have a master’s in library/information studies, and those who are not but who are still working in a professional capacity.
You can read more about the attempts to deprofessionalize librarianship here, here, and here.