How to provide library path to ./configure script

I was trying to install a library called [Openslide](https://openslide.org/) which failed during the ./configure step because it could not find a dependency ([libjpeg](https://libjpeg.sourceforge.net/)) . I thought I would proceed to build libjpeg and then manually provide the library location to ./configure to make it work. After building libjpeg at ~/libjpeg, I thought I could just add ~/libjpeg/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH by putting the following in my bashrc and re-sourcing it LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/libjpeg/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This didn't work and libjpeg still couldn't be found by the ./configure script in Openslide. I started hunting down answers online, one suggestion was to try ./configure --with-libjpeg=~/libjpeg/lib which also failed. I eventually gave up and just did a sudo apt install, but I am still curious as to why I couldn't manually provide the location of the library. Is there a correct way to do this?