Weeding my DVDs

Today was another of my quarterly trips I take to visit the various used-bookstores here in my hometown of Edmonton, and although I had a successful time of it, I have found I'm now apparently in the process of weeding my DVD collection.

We have a pretty large collection (although I do have certain friends who put my collection to shame - Hi Ron!), and as we have begun to collet Blu-Ray discs, we are now repeating the great migration from  old to new (last done in the early 2000s when we migrated our VHS tapes to DVD).

So now we have to decide which movies or TV shows deserve to be purchased a third (or in some beta-related cases a fourth) time, and surprisingly a lot of titles don't make the cut - especially if we can access these films through our local library or friends collections, so we ended up cutting out about a sixth of our collection this week.

On the plus side we now have a bit of breathing room on our DVD shelves, and we can begin to pull titles that we haven't yet seen to move to the growing pile of titles that I need to work my way through before I can try that fancy new Netflix service we've been hearing about in the last few years.

Things I've Noticed: Sometimes you don't need to keep a show you like

Over the Christmas break my wife and I finally caught up on our TV watching – catching up with a few shows that had been steadily building up on our PVR over the last few weeks (and in 1 case, months), and were finally able to check out some of the television shows we have on DVD.

The first up was Entourage. 

I purchased the first season of Entourage from a no-longer-existing store called A&B Sound in the Edmonton downtown core back in 2005; at the time I hadn’t heard anything about the show, but as I was enjoying other HBO shows like The Sopranos and Sex & The City, and the fact that the whole season retailed for $19.99, I decided to give it a shot.

Since then my wife and I have watched eight seasons of the show (which is produced by Mark Wahlberg) and have found the show to be a lot of fun and an interesting look at one view of the Hollywood lifestyle.  In the end however, we’ve decided to let our collection of the show (all 8 seasons) go on my next used-book store run.

It’s not that the show was bad – actually it was a lot of fun, and living in a house filled with women a really nice breath of “Guy-centric entertainment”, but in the end I tend to base my DVD collection on the idea that I may 1) Want to rewatch the show at a later date and 2) Have someone else in mind who might enjoy it as well.  And unfortunately the show doesn’t meet both qualifications for me.

On the plus side, I’ve now got about a foot of shelf space for future DVDs I’ll be adding to my collection, and I feel I got my moneys worth from purchasing and enjoying the series.

Things I've noticed: My Summer is 18 Days Long

Over the spring and summer of 2012 I’ve been taking evening classes to continue my work towards my Masters of Library Science Degree. The Spring had me focused on a budgeting course and the summer is focused on a course called The History of the Book. Both of these classes have been fun and informative in different ways (one of them will probably have a bigger effect on my future in the library world, and the other on my understanding of the library world).

One side-effect of the two courses however, is that once I’m all finished, I will have exactly 18 days before I hit the Fall 2012 term and begin again.

So… what to do with those 18 days.

Bookmonkey’s Top Priorities for his (almost) three weeks of course-free Summer 2012

1. Start working on stuff for my 15^th Wedding Anniversary: mostly I know I’m going to be busy in September and October with school and the new job, so this is my big opportunity to do some grunt-work involving the big event

2. Get on to my reading list for August: As I’ve said in previous posts, I try to read 7 books a month for my own pleasure. This month I’ve been reading an awful lot of books on the Mass Market Paperback format for my class – interesting reading but I still have six books to go this month and so far have only got to Warm Bodies.

3. Write Thank You / Update Letters to my Grad School References: At this time last year I was waiting and waiting to hear whether I would be accepted into Grad School or not – little known fact, you actually need letters of reference from previous teachers and others in your profession to apply. As I sent my four references the news last year that I got it, I figure this year I should send them an update on what their letters have got me so far in my continuing education

4. Begin to weed my home book/music/movie collection: August is a perfect time to follow the instructions from one of my earlier posts and begin to see if I can make some room on the many shelves I have throughout my house. As my birthday is near the end of the month, I’m pretty sure I am going to need the space.

5. Take a vacation maybe? For years my family has done summer camping trips, usually sticking to mid-week camping as the crowds are thinner, but if I want to get out at all this year I only have two available weekends in which to try (we don’t even bother trying on long weekends), so if we want to get out there this year I’ve actually only got two small windows in which to make the attempt.

And after all those things are done, maybe I’ll take a nap! Or start planning for Christmas.

Thing I've noticed: Sometimes I need to weed my television

One of the most underrated jobs in the library field is that of weeding, that is the process of removing books and other materials to make space for new ones. I think the reason for this is that at the most basic levels of library work, we kind of want to be archivists – we want to acquire new materials and never let go of old ones, because what if someday we need that title? What if some future student, or kid or just a regular reader comes into our building looking for a title and when they don’t find it they decide to leave and spend the rest of their days complaining about how useless the library is?

Here’s the thing, weeding is necessary to make space. Sometimes books are ridiculously simple to weed (computer manuals, legal texts, etc.), but eventually you need to make the hard choices and decide which books you own need to go and which need to stay.

Last week my wife and I decided to weed our viewing habits.

First off, a little context, most nights we watch about three hours of television (not including commercials, which we usually skip past); a show with our kids and then a couple hours for ourselves. Depending these are current shows, TV shows on DVD or sometimes movies, depending on our mood and the fact that we now use a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) means that we aren’t locked into any specific time to watch any show (the concept is called Timeshifting in Communications Studies and a great example of it is to think back to your viewing habits before you had a VCR if you are my age and realize that a lot of what you watched came down to what was on, rather than what you wanted to watch).

There are three good times a year to do some TV series weeding, these being late August, early January and late May – or if you will the times when current series are about to begin or end.

We try to have a one-to-one trade policy. If there is a new series coming out (such as Alcatraz) we look at the length of the show (1 hour) and try to find a comparable show we are already watching that maybe we have been losing interest in (such as Persons of Interest) this way we keep our evenings free for other stuff and can be reasonable sure that the series we watch are actually the series we want to watch. Sometimes we’ll continue to tape a show for a few weeks until we decide whether or not we’ll want to go back (for example we just started taping 30 Rock, so Whitney is currently on notice – we’ll tape both for the next two weeks, but then a choice will be made).

I know this may seem like over thinking our viewing habits, but considering that I enjoy watching television, why shouldn’t I take a little time out of my life to make sure I’m enjoying it the best I can?

Things I've Noticed: Weeding your Genre Collections can be fun

I'm off to do the used-book store rounds over the weekend, and that means that right now it's time for me to begin weeding my collection of genre books, movies and games.

I know that the idea of weeding your genre collection can be frustrating (pictured right), but as with weeding a garden, weeding your collection simply means getting rid of the materials that are stopping your collection from attaining its true level of awesomeness. Basically it's a pretty simple procedure that will make your collection stand out to your friends and be of more use to you.

Bookmonkey's guide to weeding your genre collections

1. Look at your collection - in a perfect world, take it off the shelf or out of the boxes where it lives and actually go through each item, figure out what you've got. Last time I did this I found multiple copies of the same book, something I definitely did not need.

2. Figure out which stuff you are most proud of (often it is not the stuff that all of your friends also own). This could be titles by the same author, titles about the same subject or that share some other characteristic. I have found that with the exception of my author collections (Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker), my collections of genre books tend to be of the rare or hard-to-find variety.

3. Get rid of titles that you are embarrassed to still own, titles that everyone owns and titles that you can get from the local library - this will open up tonnes of space on your shelves for new things.

3a. Realize that every item you freaked out about getting rid of in step three probably means something to you - keep them. I'm not saying get rid of stuff just for the sake of getting rid of them, I'm saying get rid of stuff that is clogging up your lifestyle.

4. Understand that your collection is a living thing, it grows, shrinks, and changes by nature, so don't feel bad about doing a little pruning now and then - it's likely to give you a healthier collection overall.

5. Remember, a collection with a high level of awesomeness makes for happy monkeys (pictured left).