My personal favorite is Reader, but Patron is fine. I absolutely cringe at Customer or Client. I think those terms misunderstand the librarian-patron relationship, framing it in a way beneficial to neither. People like libraries for their usefulness, of course, but also for the higher ideals they represent. We should be playing up this aspect of it, not ridding of it altogether.

An example: when the National Library of Scotland got a new National Librarian a couple years ago, his stated goal was to "corporatize" the NLS and we were all supposed to stop calling users "readers" and start calling them "customers". So suddenly we were no longer the caretakers of the great cultural heritage of a nation, we were simply selling a product. Is that what the people of Scotland wanted from this national symbol? No, of course not. Could the NLS have implemented changes to make it more efficient without turning it into a corporation? Of course it could have.

And now you can actually see the poll :)

The full site is now up and running!
http://informatics.buffalo.edu/org/lsj/

My barista today was saying "I can help the next guest, please". I thought, hey good idea, that captures the essence of "customer service" without the cringiness of "customer" or "client". Make your library visitors feel like a guest in your livingroom!

I always use the term 'patron', but I'm going to try to adopt the term 'guest', I really like it!

What do you call a library user?

To their faces or behind their backs? ;)

-Mike

When I'm in an academic library, I often refer to people as student or professor, partially because I've been focused on library instruction, so that defines the relationship that I have with a library user.
When I'm writing about libraries, patron for "person using the library" and user for person using the catalog, databases, etc.

So, I'm all over the board. I agree with Eli and others that we shouldn't use a term that sounds too commercial, as it dishonors our profession.

Jen