Just for instance, did you know that Galion Public Library subscribes to an online service that basically amounts to a complete phone book -- white and yellow pages -- for the entire United States? Yeah, we do. You can access it from within the library, or from home (using your library card). It's right there on our Resources page, of course, but nobody seems to notice. Whenever I tell a patron that yes, we can easily look up (listed) phone numbers and addresses in other states, they usually seem surprised. It's an undeniably useful thing, but sometimes even people who are specifically looking for it don't seem to realize that the library subscribes to just such a service.

My boss recently handed me a Library Journal article about this issue from back in June, but I had already been aware of the question before: how can the library make patrons aware of the services we offer? As Lesley Williams points out in the LJ article, people still think of the library as mostly being a source for books in particular, rather than information in general.

The thing is, the phone database is just one of over a dozen such resources. The library pays real money to make these sources of information available to our patrons, and nobody seems to know about them. We get usage statistics for a lot of these services, and in a number of cases the small amount of use they are getting does not seem worth what the library is paying for the services, yet we do not want to cancel them, because we believe they are useful things, things our patrons would be happy to have available if they were just more aware of it.

So, what can we do about this?