Self‐service in libraries: an overview

An overview article about self‐service ought to start with a definition of the concept. Although many of us have some idea of what constitutes self‐service, it is difficult to find a good definition. None of the encyclopaedias I examined had a separate entry for self‐service. The concept appears though in articles about retailing and self‐service restaurants. In the tenth edition of the Merriam‐Webster's Collegiate Dictionary the following definition was given: “the serving of oneself (as in a restaurant or service station) with goods or services to be paid for at a cashier's desk or by means of a coin‐operated mechanism”. This definition is old‐fashioned and much too limited. It does not cover all the aspects of self‐service that have been made possible through technical development. At the end of this article I will come back to a definition more applicable to self‐service for libraries, but I would like to start with an overview of different aspects important to a self‐service library.