Libraries and Bookstores: Helping people find what they want

1. Weinberger writes about the difference between finding what you want and discovering what you want within the context of a bookstore. Do libraries do a better job of helping people find and discover what they want or not?

I can’t remember the last time that I went to a physical bookstore to find a specific book. I love to go to bookstores but I just can’t recall that I’ve been to one for a specific item since I began buying books on the internet 100 years ago. That’s 100 internet years ago – not regular years.

However, I almost always have a specific item/topic or – at the very least, a genre/style/type – in mind when I hit the library.

I enjoy both experiences… the open ended browsing at the bookstore AND the ability to search for and locate exactly what I want at the library.

In a previous SLIS course, a colleague mentioned this Kroger grocery store commercial as a good example of how libraries might do a better job of helping people find and discover what they want. Granted… the commercial is long on the intangible dream of meeting customers’ needs (and hopes and dreams) and short on the specifics but surely we can figure out the details in our particular libraries.

Here’s the key line for me: “when you find something you didn’t even know you were looking for.”

I’m sure some libraries are helping patrons in this exact way, but I’m more certain that bookstores don’t make a profit if they aren’t selling items that customers didn’t know they were looking for.

The library catalog – typically an OPAC these days – is a great tool for helping people find what they know they want. Most of my patrons (K-12 students, teachers, parents) know how to make a basic search via keyword, subject, author or title. They can also search by series but our series entries have significant gaps so that isn’t always as effective or commonly used. What most patrons *don’t* realize is that almost all of our cataloged entries have hotlinks to related items such as other materials by the same author, of the same subject matter, or in the same series (if we’ve cataloged properly). I’m sure it would be helpful for us to show (or remind) our patrons of these catalog features from time to time.

This relatively simple step can have 2 immediate positive impacts:

1. It serves as a point of contact between staff and patrons which reinforces our desire to be seen as helpful problem-solvers.
2. It directly aids patrons to find information that they didn’t necessarily know that they wanted.