From “Problematizing Patron-Driven Acquisitions” (Library Journal):
There is also the importance of developing collections for patrons yet unborn.a library is more than a shopping site built to satisfy immediate patron needs. A well-chosen collection is a cartography of knowledge that helps guide the novice researcher toward books that they would never think to ask for. … Umberto Eco, who argued for library coffee shops decades before they became trendy, said at the opening of a new library in Milan that "the whole idea of a library is based on a misunderstanding: that the reader goes into the library to find a book whose title he knows." Its real purpose, he said, "is to discover books of whose existence the reader has no idea."
