Content Audits - for Kids!

My kids aren’t old enough to have jobs yet, but somehow that hasn’t prevented them from collecting a lot of stuff. As they get older and celebrate more birthdays and Christmases, the amount of stuff they have gets larger and larger. My coworker Connor Cantrell recently wrote an article about the concept of “weeding” in the cycle of collection development, which is the act of removing items from a collection. Her article also hinted at how it applies to more than just library collections. Just like libraries weed their collections, at times it becomes necessary to weed the kids’ toy collection.

I can’t just start tossing toys out willy-nilly, though. Before I can start planning to remove items from a collection, I need to know what’s actually in that collection. It’s time for a content audit, yay!

The majority of the kids toys are kept in the living room in a wooden organizer with 8 cubby holes. Each hole in the organizer has a cloth box in which the toys are kept. Groups of related toys are also bagged up in the cloth boxes to keep them together in theory. Here’s a picture for your reference:

On photo left are some toys in larger boxes, with a dollhouse and Lego on top. Unlike my work in digital information spaces, one concern with this collection is physical space. Just as public and academic librarians need to be aware of shelf space, and archivists need to track cubic footage and the size, shape, and preservation requirements of the items in their collections, making sure the toy collection fits into the existing space is something I have to keep in mind.

Now that I have an understanding of where and how the collection is stored, as well as the space I have available for storage, it’s auditing time.?

Two bins are apparently dedicated to goopy, sticky substances which dry over time from exposure to air.

Here we have several tubs of modeling dough, as well as slime in levels of wetness ranging from “fresh” to “mummified.” Along with these substances are various tools for cutting, molding, squishing, and otherwise manhandling the clay (and the slime too, if it’s the fluffier kind*).?

*If your kids love slime as much as my daughter does, you might know that “fluffy” slime is the kind you can make at home by adding shaving cream to the ingredients.?

The next couple of bins contain action figures and plastic figurines, as well as a few classic toys.

These characters come from an online game creation and multiplayer online game application called Roblox, which has about 70 million daily active users . Roblox contains some incredibly popular games, and these figurines are based on characters in those games.?

Moving on from Roblox, these molded metal figurines are characters from Minecraft.

Minecraft is an open world video game, and the majority of play involves mining raw materials and crafting them into new materials. As players explore their game world, they’ll encounter peaceful villagers, dangerous monsters, and an assortment of animals. The figures here are representations of all of those, as well as the player character.?

• Tangent: Those Roblox figures have a lot of points of articulation for how relatively small they are.
• A “point of articulation” is a part where one piece of the figure can mechanically change its orientation in relation to the rest of the figure. So those places that allow for motions like twisting, folding, turning, etc.

goopy, sticky substances which dry over time from exposure to air

In this bag, we have empty Pez dispensers, which the kids also like to use like action figures: battling each other, spectating the action, or flying into the sky. The kids are probably lucky that we don’t care about keeping them in mint condition in case they’re worth something in the future.

The final bag in this cloth box contains a gang of spooky plastic figurines: vampires, skeletons, giant spiders, gravestones, creatures from colorful lagoons, etc. They mostly seem to be there to act as support for the other figurines during big action figure fights.

The second box has two bags of plastic animal and dinosaur figures.

Sometimes in a content audit, you’ll discover things in a place where they don’t quite belong. In this case, those of you with sharp eyes may notice that there’s a Jurassic World dinosaur mixed in with the other dinosaurs, along with Yoshi from the Super Mario games.

This box also contains a Mr. Potato Head and hopefully all his spare parts, a screaming rubber chicken, and a mechanical hamster. The hamster is really fun to watch, I already know I don’t want to remove it from the collection.

Once my content audit is complete and I have an understanding of what is in the collection, I can start developing a weeding plan. The weeding plan will describe:

1. How to determine which items can be removed from the collection (Is the toy appropriate to their age and development? Do they play with the toy?),
2. What to do with the toy after it is removed from the collection (Is it in suitable shape to be donated? Do we know anyone who might want this?).

The plan will also involve stakeholder input (asking the kids if there’s anything they don’t want to keep anymore, or if they play with any particular toy.).

If you’ve got some cleaning up that you just haven’t gotten around to, this might resonate with you. How do you do your personal content audits? Do you have a personal schedule for going through your stuff? Is slime even allowed in your house? I’d love to read your comments.