This is an interesting quote from Meredith Farkas' Information Wants to Be Free Blog:
"We create blogs for populations that don’t want them. We develop programs that none of our patrons attend. We see what people are doing successfully at other libraries and we try to replicate those successes, not considering the fact that our population is not the same as theirs. I’ve certainly been guilty of that sort of hubris. In short, we think we know what our patrons want without ever having asked them."
Do you really know your patrons? I am constantly amazed by how much planning libraries do without gettting any input from their users. In today's world, it is not difficult to create surveys for patron input. NTRLS uses SurveyMonkey.com for its surveys. If you do not have the time to do an extensive survey, put a poll on your website. Services like Bpath make this easy. Let's give patrons what they want instead of deciding this for them.
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