Evaluating your nursing collection: a quick way to preserve nursing history in a working collection*

Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing in 1859 [1] heralded the beginning of modern nursing. Nurses in the nineteenth century had not yet achieved professional credibility, therefore, many of the early texts were written by physicians. When nurses began to publish books, librarians and nurses did not always recognize their value, and many were discarded. For example, of the historical items mentioned by Allen [2], only one copy of both Makers of Nursing History (1928) by Pennock and Nursing Ethics (1900) by Isabel Hampton Robb can be found in Ohio. It is vital that libraries now recognize and preserve the important works of nurses so that nursing students of the future have them available, both as historical background and as a basis for comparison with current nursing issues. Many books of value to the history of nursing often exist in small nursing collections and should not be discarded without much thought. The significance of many publications can be determined only in retrospect, after their full impact has been appreciated. Meanwhile, it falls to librarians who manage nursing collections to make the best decisions about what to keep, both for current and future users of the collection. On the other hand, shelf space is a problem for many academic libraries, and weeding is necessary to maintain a workable and usable nursing collection that contains up-to-date clinical information. While the collection development policies and space limitations of each library will determine how much historical material librarians will acquire and which books they will withdraw, this article proposes some basic criteria for deciding which history-related materials to keep in nursing collections and what to withdraw and offers a bit of guidance on what to purchase.