Retention Philosophy

Due to limits of space and volunteer support, the Mountaineers Library is envisioned as a reference library for Mountaineer core activities in the Pacific Northwest.
Our core activities include mountaineering, hiking, snow sports, and conservation. They do not include bicycling or yachting.
Our geographic scope includes the Pacific Northwest and the mountainous country of western North America.
We also retain selected titles of national or global scope that pertain to our core activities. (It is not our intention to retain regional titles outside our Northwest-centered scope.)
We retain titles within our scope in order to maintain a "living" collection that can be enhanced over time by volunteers with deep knowledge of our core subjects.
Our intent is to partner with another Northwest library (such as the University of Washington) to transfer materials outside our scope to a location that can make them available to Northwest researchers.

Notes:

The decision tables below are based on Mountaineers Library Subject Groupings.
All books designated with a K or M wildcard will be retained regardless of other criteria.
All books designated with a D wildcard will be dispensed regardless of other criteria.
Cells marked with hyphens ( -- ) in the tables below are "don't care" items.
In the online catalog, the retain status is marked Y for yes, N for no, and T for tentative (used for what-if investigations). D is used for not-to-be-retained duplicates of titles that are slated for retention.

Books To Be Dispensed

As a general rule, books matching the subject groupings in this table will be dispensed unless they are designated with a wildcard.

Criteria in bold are currently in effect. Other criteria are being considered for expanding our collection.

After applying wildcards and the criteria in the Dispensed and Retained tables (above), books that remain unresolved should generally be dispensed.

If exceptions to this rule are found, we should update the decision tables to account for them.