A popular post on CAPHIS last year and this year came from librarian K.D. Proffit. The topic? Internet shopping sites. Drawing on the results of her call for the best of the web, Proffit organized an immensely popular class on Internet shopping at the Sutter Resource Library in Sacramento, CA. Said Proffit, “[I]it brought people to the library who had never visited before.”

Another possible tactic to up traffic came to me this morning when I glanced a redhead reading James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans on the subway: the banishment of late fees. By which I don’t mean a patron’s debt should be canceled automatically; I just mean why not make it possible for a friend or relative of that patron to cover the fees as a kind of holiday gift? This would call for some marketing ingenuity, but think of all the people who dodge using libraries because they know they owe, so off to Barnes & Noble they go.

One more suggestion: as we Book Review Editors complete our Best Books 2006 list (check here next week for the winners), I couldn’t help but think how ours and other lists could serve as, well, gift guides for bibliophiles. Much as consumer magazines compile ideas (”For The Insanely Glamorous, a Swarovski crystal–encrusted iPod”), so could libraries by posting these lists or doing a display of winners. Collection development librarians could flex their cerebrums and break the books into categories for thriller fans, romance heads, etc.