Yesterday, Justin the Librarian tweeted this post about loyalty and Lady Gaga. Justin, Toby Greenwalt and I started talking about a name for library fans. Lady Gaga calls her fans “Little Monsters” which helps to create a culture around Gaga fandom (including a clawed salute, evidently) and has proved to be the basis of a powerful following.

A name for library fans is a bit trickier. Lady Gaga has the advantage of being a one-person powerhouse. She dubbed her fans “Little Monsters,” wrote a manifesto for them and got a tattoo to prove her love. Should a library fan name be national? That would certainly lend itself to the galvanizing effect that fandom offers. But libraries are inherently local organization, serving their own population alone, so a locally-derived nickname might resonate better.

We didn’t come to any conclusions, but Toby posted the question to Skokie’s Facebook page to see what library users would like to call themselves. So far, no takers, but this got me thinking about surveys and libraryland’s emphasis on responding to patron needs and desires.

Generally speaking, librarians want to meet their own patrons’ needs and rather than conjecture about what those needs are, we like to ask. Good idea, except getting a good cross section isn’t easy. Survey takers are often a self-selecting group and can lead libraries into responding to a specific subset of their users while ignoring others.

Surveys may not be popular, but quizzes enjoy long-standing popularity. Magazines had quizzes well before we were all finding out how millennial we are. Facebook is awash in quizzes and sites like Klout give us armchair analysis of our Twitter habits (Klout says I’m a connector and Facebook quizzes have informed me that if I was a dog, I’d be a Bernese Mountain Dog). People love to gather information about themselves, even when that information is silly or inaccurate (I have to confess that I was terribly disappointed when I realized that Klout’s “possible influencers” list was a random list of “personas” that I follow).

But most of these sites are likely using these quizzes to gather data. Data that we’re all too happy to surrender in exchange for being told which kind of cocktail we are. Are any libraries using this tactic? Rather than a survey on library use (boooorrrriiing!) why not a quiz? What kind of patron are you? What kind of bookworm are you? What kind of movie buff are you? Even a thinly disguised survey (really, “what kind of patron are you?” isn’t going to fool that many people, even if the answers are cutesy- “You’re a movie maven!”) might attract a broader range of users than a straight up survey.

Is anyone already doing this? Would anyone like to collaborate on a library quiz?