What Do You Call Them?

For the last few days publib subscribers have been tossing around the always interesting question about what to call people who register for library cards, or frequent the facility to use the collections and databases. Are they clients, customers, patrons, users, or even as a recent study suggests, MEMBERS??? I was going to post this as a reply there but time got away from me, and my comments got overly lengthy for a listserv reply. So here goes:

Clients hire (sometimes after a negotiation) a professional or professional services firm to carry out a specific task for an agreed upon sum of money; the choices of whom to hire are generally limited. Customers purchase goods or services offered to all for a given price at a point in time; if people do not care for the selection that being offered or find a better price elsewhere, they go there . I cannot see how either term describes the relationship between a library and its public. Users isn't a bad term but it went out the window with the rise in the number of people abusing various substances. Library cardholders or registrants both seem awkward and a lot to keep typing out.

I, for one, have never used the expression joined a library nor do I recall ever hearing anyone else say it. Most people seem say "I have a library card" much as they say "I have an overnight parking permit." Perhaps becoming a member is a regional expression but having lived in New York City, suburban NJ, Denver, CO and in and around the city of Milwaukee I've experienced a pretty good geographic span. Somewhere I should have run across becoming a member of my local library but I haven't before the discussion on publib.

Libraries ask people to become members of their friends group but a membership in the library itself strikes me as competiting with your own friends group since getting a public library card or using library services is free of charge since you are directly or indirectly supporting the library through tax $$$. This doesn't strike me as a good idea.

I used to work for a museum that went from being County department to an NPO managed by a private Board of Directors in 1992. Immediately the nearly 50-year old Friends of the Museum group that had supported the publicly funded museum was dissolved. In place of FOMPM membership everyone became members of the museum. The FOMPM staff were given new titles - Director of Development and Member Services Coordinator (among others) . Perfectly sensible -- a separate Friends group in a private or quasi public institution is redundant, unless that's an additional category of membership.

Of course, more than a decade later, long-time members still refer to themselves as Friends of the Museum; maybe they hadn't adjusted, maybe friends was just a less pretentious word. After all member carries a connotation of a special relationship, often one that is open only to an elite few.

Considering museum members had problems getting around the newly named relationship, I doubt taxpayers and/or community residents generally perceive themselves as members of their libraries. A pair of clever publib subscribers came up with the term custpatronomers and maybe that'll will win the day, cheering all but the spelling challenged. Meantime, I'll stick with users and patrons, depending on the circumstances or context. After all libraries flourish through the patronage of their communities and they demonstrate their value to the community through use.

So I'm trying to figure out how the study came up with members. Were the respondents escapees from a professional association meeting who got confused? Did the researcher time-travel back to the 1st half of the 19th century to conduct the study? Or visit another English-speaking country that lacks our splendid public library heritage? Or mix up coefficients in the statistical analysis of the responses?