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Description - Buyers and Borrowers by Charles D Emery

This book takes a practical approach to some long-standing and significant problems that librarians are continually called upon to address, such as: Is the library reaching its target audience? What do shifts in use patterns reflect? How often can users be expected to visit the library on the average? Can users be identified by category by the way they use the library? Author David Emery takes a close look at some methods which can be used to accurately answer these questions. Using the analogy of repeat buying, which has been shown to follow consistent and regular patterns across a wide range of consumers, brands, products, time periods, and other conditions, Mr Emery applies the same concepts of research to the investigation and analysis of library use. There are remarkable similarities between library borrowing and consumer purchasing patterns. Thus, not only does the consumer purchasing model provide us with a means of investigating and predicting library user behaviour, but it furnishes an appropriate mechanism for the more sophisticated analysis of that behaviour through the applications of marketing concepts such as product mix and brand switching.
By drawing the comparison between library borrowing and consumer purchasing, Mr Emery has identified library administrators have hitherto lacked: a readily accessible corpus of theory and practical example upon which to base a coherent and cumulative body of research into the behaviour of library users. The results should be useful as imput to planning and distribution of resources in matters of budgets, service hours, personnel and programming.

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