Last night we had about ten people visiting our house for a meeting. Lying on a table was a review copy of Melissa Hope Ditmore’s Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work (Greenwood Press, 2006). I cannot comment on it yet, perhaps because the deadline for my review isn’t yet breathing down my neck.

Our guests’ responses, however, were a bit startling. The topic didn’t shock them. After all, this deals with the proverbial world’s oldest profession. But the book’s existence surprised them. It was an epiphany for me. Well educated people, among them a published historian, an engineer, a realtor, and an architect, found a specialized encyclopedia to be a novelty. Having worked among such works for 30 years and having reviewed at least several hundred specialized encyclopedias, I did not appreciate how little members of the general public are aware of such information sources.

This raises questions about how we librarians generate awareness of the range of information they can obtain from their libraries. How can we help members of the public recognize the eclectic range of useful information we offer for them? Many creative, committed librarians work at this every day. Outreach is fundamental to school, public, and academic libraries. How in the age of Google can we let people know how much they can obtain from their libraries that Google cannot duplicate?