Mary Cavanagh’s blog post, based on her sabbatical research, on:
What do we call the people public libraries have been delegated to serve?
What are the primary nouns being used by these libraries to refer to the people who access their services?
“This table summarizes my take on the preferred terms used (one term per category for each [CULC] library system) in each of governance and planning, and these library policies.
| Governance + Planning | # of libraries’ preferred term | Conduct + Computer Use Policies | # of libraries’ preferred term |
| Customer | 24 | Customer | 19 |
| Patron | 10 | User | 16 |
| Member | 4 | Patron | 6 |
| Clientèle1 | 3 | Member | 2 |
| User | 3 | Client | 2 |
| Canadians2″ | 1 |
Lots more in the post and a great resources for further discussion.
I’m not on the fence – I prefer ‘member’!
Stephen