libtool issue in a Makefile.am reference

[Murray S. Kucherawy]

I've got a package that first builds a library and then a binary that links to 
the library.  The binary build references it via:

progname_LIBADD = ../libdirectory/libraryname.la

A previous version of the library was installed in /usr/local/lib.  Some other 
things autoconf discovers causes -L/usr/local/lib to be added to 
progname_LDFLAGS.  This appears to result in my progname_LIBADD reference being 
replaced simply by -llibraryname rather than referring to the one that was just 
built in ../libdirectory, so the build fails because some symbols are missing 
from the installed one.  It's possible libtool is doing this, but I believe 
automake is invoking libtool so I figured this is the right place to ask.

So...  Is there a way to have automake tell libtool not to do this, and prefer 
the just-compiled library over the installed one (if any)?

-MSK