If you are searching through our website at home and cannot find the book you are looking for, you can always suggest we purchase that item. This is something you can easily do from our website. From the library’s homepage, look on the right side for the words “Borrowing Info.”
When you hover over those words, you will see a list of choices appear. Find “Suggest a Purchase” at the very bottom of the list and click on it. You will be directed to our “Suggest a Purchase” page.
Here is a link to that page: http://www.santaclaritalibrary.com/suggest-a-purchase/
On this page, you can enter the title of item you think we should buy and the author/artist (this helps when there are popular titles so we can get the exact item that you want). This request page is not exclusively for books either. If there is a movie, tv show, music, etc. that you are looking for, you can request that here as well. Title and author/artist are the only required fields that you must enter. All other info, while not required, can be super helpful when it comes time for the library to go through the list of requested items.
- Designating an audience will help direct the request to the correction librarian with that area of expertise.
- Letting us know where you heard of the item can be a helpful way to know of trending areas that we might be missing that we should pay more attention to.
- Finally, at the bottom, there is a space to put your own info. This will only alert you that we have received your request. It will not alert you if and when we have purchased the item.
Does this request guarantee that the library will buy the missing item? No, it does not. There are many factors we must consider when purchasing items. The #1 factor is whether or not the item is available. Books go out of print all the time. We cannot control that, and we are not always aware when something is out of print. Disney has a vault for all their movies, which means they go away for years at a time. Your request can put us on alert for when certain movies come out of the Disney vault again, though.
The library must purchase items through certain vendors so there are going to be some items that we will not be able to find. We can also not guarantee that an item will be purchased immediately. It may have a waitlist, or there may be some other reason why it may not be readily available. Because of this, we never guarantee that we will purchase everything, but we promise that we will consider every purchase request.
Your requests are very important to us, though. We have so many items to keep up with that it can escape our attention when an item is no longer there. As a children’s librarian, I sometimes do not realize that a book is no longer with us until I am on the floor, trying to help a child find it. I don’t know how many times I have heard myself saying, “That’s weird. It used to be right here.” After that, I can look in our online catalog and see that it was never returned to us or damaged. Your requests are just another step along the way to helping our library be the best that it can be, which is why we make it so easy for everyone to do through our website.
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