Tendências no desbaste das coleções de periódicos impressos nas bibliotecas universitárias: um estudo comparativo das estratégias adotadas no Brasil e em Portugal

Abstract

Weeding is a fundamental activity in the collections management of university libraries. Social changes, as a result of technologies, have brought challenges to print journal collections. The literature highlights that this type of material has been preferred for weeding, as it occupies a large physical space, necessary for other purposes, and because of its accessibility in digital format, which has resulted in the low use of printed volumes. In this context, weeding is understood as a process that may based on the evaluation of the item, result in the withdrawal or transfer of the title. This study aims to identify and compare the reasons that lead to weeding, and the strategies that are being adopted by university libraries, in Brazil and Portugal, for weeding the collection of printed journals. It is characterized as an exploratory investigation, in which reports available in the literature were used to identify the reasons and strategies for weeding, and the questionnaire to collect data from 118 libraries. The results show the reasons for weeding, typified in catalyst and secondary, and the strategies related to how weeding occurs and with the decisions taken in the destination of the items. We conclude that the motivations for weeding are similar, with the lack of physical space being the main reason for the weeding action. As for the strategies measured in the literature and in the investigated libraries, they are also similar, however, they are distinguished by the type of item that is weeding. It is noticed that, in Brazil, the collections are worked in a more cooperative way between the libraries of the same university, while in Portugal, the decisions, in general, are individual, in each library. In this way, the study reached the proposed objectives, although the construction of the questionnaire, based on the literature, did not allow us to know the specificities of the investigated libraries and made the answers homogeneous, resulting in a generalist comparative analysis.