Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping is on my reading list this month but it deserves its own post. It has inspired a great deal of thinking about what we measure, why and how we use it to declare ourselves successful (or not). Please note there is a newer version of this title, Updated and Revised for the Internet, the Global Consumer, and Beyond, but I am reading the older one because it is what my library had, I will be requesting the newer one. As I listen to this I can’t help apply much of the science of shopping and buying to libraries. Like many retail stores we declare our success and failure based on the numbers reported by the cash register or generated by frequent buyer accounts or credit card reports (ILS stats anyone?) I am not even half way through this book and I already have a long is a list of questions about our physical spaces. Some of these we track on our websites or talk about when we talk about information seeking behavior but not when we talk about physical space. Here are a just a few: Why did they come to the library? A specific title? Did
