OK, OK. Maybe the title for this post is a little overly dramatic. But stick with me.

I’ve long been frustrated by how easily people seem to be hoodwinked into believing nonsense as long as the nonsense is couched in a catchy phrase (still more so if it rhymes). Consider the idiocy of popular sayings like:

• “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (Unless it leaves you, you know, permanently disabled.)
• “Cheaters never win” (Guess what? Cheaters win all the time.)
• “The customer is always right” (… said no one who has worked with customers, ever.)
• “Money can’t buy happiness” (It sure can — to a reasonable degree, of course.)

Today I’m going to get grouchy about a phrase that, throughout my career as a librarian, I’ve been hearing people evoke as if it had any semblance of validity in real life:

If you build it, they will come.

Those of us Over a Certain Age will immediately recognize this as the catch phrase that remains as the lasting legacy of an old Kevin Costner film called Field of Dreams. (In the movie, Costner’s character was convinced by a disembodied voice to build a full-sized baseball field on his property so that the ghosts of a bunch of legendary baseball players could come play there.)

Anyone who has worked in libraries in the past 30 years will have heard this phrase invoked countless times, in support of ideas that have ranged from utterly foolish to very good. And anyone who has worked in libraries for any amount of time will be able to cite numerous examples of things that they built, on the assumption that building the thing would automatically attract people, but to which… no one came. And yet we still hear that phrase, over and over, invoked like a talisman .

Here’s the problem: things that we build in libraries have no natural attractive properties. Whether it’s a web page, a libguide, an institutional repository, a lecture series, a support service — whatever it is, the fact of its appearance will not automatically create attraction.

How do we build things to which people will come? The answer is both simple and elusive: people will come to things that meet a felt need. Not necessarily an actual need, but a felt need.

What do I mean by that? Tune in to my next post, on The Difference Between Water and Broccoli.