Libraries are more than just books and magazines. You can find movies on DVD, or if you have an old favorite that has not been rereleased on DVD, very likely a VHS cassette. You can find educational DVDs and cassettes that probably aren't readily available commercially. You can find music--printed or recorded in a variety of formats. You can find government documents. You can find games. One library I used to visit a lot had a circulating collection of prints and small sculptures--very handy for a class I was teaching. Or you can go into the library to use their computers.

And on the library's computers you can find all kinds of electronic resources that are not available free on the Internet. Libraries spend thousands of dollars each to subscribe to databases that contain a wealth of information. They are free to library patrons, but since they are so expensive, web crawlers cannot get you into their contents. And what kinds of things? Citations to journal and magazine articles on every imaginable subject, sometimes the very latest issues, sometimes more than two hundred years old. And not only citations, but often abstracts or even full text.

And the books! You can find new books, old books, books that are in lots of libraries, maybe books that are only in fewer than a dozen nationwide. You can find books so rare or special that you have to look at them in the library, because they are kept in a special collection. And whatever you can find in a library, you can use most of it free of charge.

Libraries have changed a lot in recent years, and many of the changes are bewildering. Many people, unaware of these changes, still think a library is only a place to get books, and that library personnel are there to make sure that no one talks above a whisper or eats or drinks anything. Other people are reluctant to go into a library because there is such a lot of stuff there that they are afraid they can never find what they want.

There are three primary ways of finding information in a library: the library's catalog; the databases it subscribes to; and the reference librarians. Once upon a time, libraries had card catalogs, and the "databases" came in the form of multi-volume sets of books like the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, which made patrons wade through multiple volumes to find articles in a very limited number of publications. Everything is online now. Librarians still offer personal service, either at the reference desk, in their offices, or over the phone. But with computers, they can also answer questions by email, chat, or other electronic means.

The catalog can indeed be confusing. Google has set up expectations of what a search should be like, and library catalogs don't work like Google. There are two reasons for that. One, unfortunately, is that today's online catalogs are not very well designed. There are no clear standards about how they ought to look, what information they should display, or how people should search them. The other reason is that catalogs and search engines are fundamentally different in how they work.

Search engines crawl the web looking for certain key words. They have algorithms for searching and indexing probably billions of pages that change every day, and for choosing which ones seem the most relevant answer to a query. Unfortunately, if someone types "Venus" into that little box, the search engine has no idea if the person wants information about the planet or the ancient Roman goddess. It will probably display both, plus the latest information on Venus Williams for good measure. And if the searcher wanted information about the goddess and did not know that she was known as Aphrodite among the Greeks, the search engine will not return any of the pages that contain Aphrodite but not Venus.

The library catalog, on the other hand, is a database. It contains individual records for everything owned by the library. The contents of these records are sorted into a number of different indices, including an index entry for author, title, subject, language, format, etc. And so each record must contain two kinds of information.

The first is a description of the item: the title, author, names of other individuals (co-authors, editors, translators, illustrators, etc.), and perhaps the table of contents, each copied exactly from the item, along with such details as the publisher, date, language, format, etc.

The other is something called "controlled vocabulary". It points to what are called access points, taken from lists of prescribed forms of personal names, corporate names, geographic names, preferred titles, series, and subjects. There is one and only one prescribed way to express any of these things, no matter what it says on the item. This concept may seem confusing, but it is vitally important.

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote lots of books and was the subject of others. Then he was elected Pope Benedict XVI. As soon as he became pope, the prescribed form of his name in library catalogs changed, too. After a while, most people will remember Pope Benedict, but forget what his name was before his elevation. Having only one form of his name (with cross references operating behind the scenes) means that anyone can easily find everything the library has by or about him, no matter which name was used when the item first appeared.

Similarly, the catalog has separate subject headings for "Venus (Planet)" and "Venus (Roman deity)," with a convenient cross reference to the latter for "Aphrodite (Greek deity)."

Titles can also be complicated, as in the case of a book translated from another language, which may have more than one English title. Musical compositions can be even more complicated. Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" is his 14th piano sonata. It is in C# minor. It is his op. 27, no. 2. His own subtitle was not "Moonlight" (in English or any other language), but "Sonata quasi una fantasia." On the covers of sheet music, on the tables of contents of various anthologies, or on various recordings, the title can start with "Moonlight" in various languages, "Piano Sonata," or "Sonata for Piano". It can include 14th (or no. 14), the opus number and the key--all of them or some of them in any order, or only one of them, or none at all.

Having these separate indices with a single official way to express important concepts is obviously an important feature of the catalog. It allows searchers to combine the power of keyword searching with the power of searching the controlled vocabulary. All of the other online databases are organized in pretty much the same way, but every one of them has a different list of prescribed terms (or, unfortunately, sometimes none at all). Not all databases are as careful as library headings to eliminate synonyms and have one single term for every name and concept.

In each case, it is possible to find the official terms (which in most cases no one could ever guess) by doing a keyword search, selecting some of the records that come up, and looking to see what the hotlinks are. The hotlinks are the official terms. Clicking on them will yield everything in the database that includes them.

Confusing? It gets much easier with practice. In the meantime, that is one of the things reference librarians are trained to help you with. They are even trained to help you figure out what you are really looking for if it is not yet clear in your own mind. But just as it requires some knowledge of how databases are organized in order to find the riches they contain, it is also helpful to know <a href="http://www.ehow.com/how_5350187_ask-librarian-questions.html">how to ask a librarian questions. </a>

One of the things librarians learn in library school is that the question a patron first asks is seldom what they really want to know. The questions are often overly broad, either because some patrons have not thought their needs through very well, or because others think that broad questions are easier to ask and therefore easier to answer. It helps the librarian to know what you need as specifically as possible, not only in terms of your subject matter, but also whether you need basic or highly technical information, whether you need a lot of information or just quick facts, etc. The better you can express your needs, the faster you'll get your answers and the less frustrating the conversation will be both for you and the librarian.

Whether you need to prepare a paper or a speech, or whether you are just looking for something to read, watch, or listen to for pure enjoyment, libraries have a lot of what you want, and librarians are there to help you find it.