What is the best/recommended technique for referencing development libraries?

[Patrick Doyle]

I am playing with the Gstreamer zbar plugin, which is an
autoconfiscated library.

It relies upon another autoconfiscated library, libzbar.

I have a custom application which loads gstzbar, which, in turn, loads
libzbar from /usr/lib/wherever.  Everything works quite nicely, thank
you all very much.

But now I would like to compile a custom version of libzbar, and tell
my custom gstzbar plugin to reference that library instead of the one
install in /usr/lib.

What's the best/recommended way to do this?

One way I could do this is via brute force.  I could uninstal the
precompiledl libzbar, compile the new version, install it in
/usr/local, and recognize that pkg-config will find the new one in
/usr/local/lib.

I feel like there should be a better way to do this sort of thing.
Any suggestions?

--wpd