Last week I grumped about the phrase “If you build it, they will come,” which I’ve heard countless times over the course of my career — usually referring to a new service or program that someone in the library feels must be established. When asked searching questions about the evidence for need, or the potential for a good balance between cost and benefit, too often the answer is a solemn (or puckish) incantation of “If we build it, they will come.”

In reality, of course, libraries build things all the time to which no one comes.

But that’s an easy observation to make. The more difficult question is: how do you build something to which people are likely to come?

About ten years ago I wrote a column in Against the Grain in which I discussed the difference between water and broccoli. Or, more accurately, I discussed the difference between thirst and vitamin deficiency. I pointed out that when a person is thirsty, that person will naturally and automatically crave water (or, in my case, Diet Coke), and will recognize water immediately as something that will ease her thirst. However, someone who has a deficiency of vitamins C and A will probably not crave broccoli — despite broccoli’s high levels of those vitamins. In the case of water, there’s a natural confluence between the person’s actual need and the person’s felt need. In the case of broccoli, there will usually be a marked disconnect between actual and felt need.

In libraries, we see something very much like this dynamic as well when it comes to our services. Some of those services are like offering water to the thirsty: interlibrary loan (“Help! I need this book that the library doesn’t own!”), textbook collections (“Help! My textbook costs $300 and I can’t afford it!”), and online journals (“Yay! I can access the article I need without leaving my dorm/office/home!”) are all examples of these.

But some of the services we offer are more like trying to convince someone with a vitamin deficiency to eat broccoli, even though it doesn’t sound yummy to them: institutional repositories (to which we struggle to attract faculty authors, no matter how carefully we explain the benefits of deposit); help desks (which are sometimes busy, but not usually, and even at their busiest serve only a tiny fraction of our constituencies); print collections (usage of which has radically fallen with the migration of scholarly content online) are examples of these. The benefits of these services may be entirely real, but for the most part our patrons just don’t feel compelled to use them.

So what’s the solution? We can approach a problem like this from two different directions.

The first is the demand-side approach: it is to shift from trying to convince our patrons to behave differently, and instead focus on giving our patrons whatever they want.

The second is the supply-side approach: it is to increase our efforts to change users’ behavior, through some combination of structural restriction (making it harder for them to do what we think they shouldn’t) and education (hopefully increasing their desire to do what we think they should).

Obviously, these two approaches do not represent a binary choice: every library combines them to some degree and in different degrees with regard to different services and programs. But it matters very much how these approaches are balanced in your library.

It should also be obvious that I can’t prescribe for any other library what that balance should be at an organizational level, still less how that balance should be achieved in specific library areas. But I can suggest a few principles that it makes sense for all of us to bear in mind when considering this issue in our libraries:

• For time-sensitive needs, focus on the demand side. Sometimes people don’t have time to be taught how to fish — they just need a fish, quickly, before they starve. And yes, it’s true that sometimes a patron’s time-sensitive needs are time-sensitive because that patron has managed his time badly. Try not to worry too much about that — honestly, teaching patrons how to manage their time is outside the library’s remit.
• For more systemic needs, focus on the supply side. But bear in mind that purely library-based education efforts are most likely to be effective if they’re undertaken in collaboration with (or at the behest of) members of the teaching faculty — for the simple reason that the library is rarely in a position to make education offerings compulsory. Inviting patrons to come to the library and be educated is going to be much less effective than bringing library education to places they’re already required to be.
• Align strategies with faculty goals and be flexible. Bear in mind that some faculty may be very anxious for you to support them in their educational efforts; others may need you to focus on meeting immediate student needs quickly; others may want to be left alone to do bibliographic literacy work themselves. A library that becomes rigid and doctrinaire regarding patron education will quickly lose support.
• Don’t give up on education, but don’t rely on its efficacy. To the degree possible the library should be intuitive and effortless to use. That should be our goal. But because we’ll never reach that goal completely, it’s also essential to offer education. But we need to be very careful not to confuse necessity with virtue.

And that will actually be the topic of my next post — bibliographic instruction as a necessary evil.