So I just found out about this new book (Teaching as Leadership, in which Teach for America releases decades of data on what makes teachers effective, and yes I’m pretty much twitching with paroxysms of squeeee about this). It doesn’t come out until February, but hey, I can wait (…impatiently), and I’m fine with putting in a request for it through the library and getting it when I get it…

….except I can’t, because the library doesn’t have it yet, so a catalog search is fruitless.

Which, I mean, I’m also sort of OK with. Except…what happens to the information that I’ve searched for this book, and not found it? Does it just fall into the void somewhere? Is it collected in some useful way and acted upon? (Help me out here, O people who have studied collection development.)

And why is there not an easy button where I can say, hey, I want this book? Seems like fruitless searches should automatically yield a “suggest this for purchase” option.

While I’m on the topic, can anyone tell me how the Amazon preorder system works? Obviously Amazon is, in some way, cataloging and allowing requests for books it does not, in point of fact, have yet, and my library is not. (Leaving aside, for the moment, that Amazon’s catalog and search makes me want to stab things. And that my husband and I had a conversation about authority control issues with a record for a book that has apparently just been received by our local library system but not yet cataloged. This, if it works as a permalink.)