What do people want? What do they really, really want?

This is the first question posed to would-be reference librarians on their first day of library school. Posed in 100 different ways to 100 different library customers, this essential question represents the raison d’etre of libraries and librarians everywhere.

So what the library staff here at SLAC still want to know, year after year, is WHAT DO YOU WANT on your library shelves?

It’s buying season at the Library, and that means more new books. Every month the Library typically acquires and displays more than 150 titles.

Who decides which titles to buy?

The Library’s book buyers rely on the catalogs distributed by proven and highly regarded publishers such as Springer-Verlag, World Scientific, AIP and Elsevier.

Book reviews featured in journals such as Nature, Science, Physics Today, American Scientist and New Scientist also provide leads to the hot or not-so-hot picks in high energy physics.

We often compare title lists with sister laboratories such as DESY and CERN, looking for titles most desirable to the high energy physics and synchrotron radiation communities.

The best, most important source for book recommendations are the field experts themselves—SLAC employees and users. So we here in the Library are once again, in this book buying time of year, repeating that eternal reference library mantra: What do you want, what do you really, really want?

Let us know what book titles you would like to see on Library shelves. You can use our online order form (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/slaconly/forms/purchase.html), or stop by the Library where you can pick up a ‘Book Shopping List’ on which to jot down work-related titles you see on your evening or weekend trips to the bookstore.