But despite the popular media's occasional mistakes about the profession, librarians are also widely recognized for their dedication to a world of knowledge that is distinctly their own. Librarians still love books, and for a long time they have also loved other media, such as sound recordings, maps, musical scores, films, and video. But it would be even truer to say they love bringing works of all sorts to their patrons, either by organizing and displaying copies or through personal assistance. There is now an armada of library catalogs on the Internet, including those of the Free Library of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania .
Librarians are among the most active users of electronic reference works and discussion lists .
They run hundreds of World Wide Web sites. Through telecommunications, librarians contribute to and routinely use one of the largest databases in the world, the OCLC union catalog in Dublin, Ohio. Its 30 million records of books and other media reflect the holdings of more than 6,000 libraries, U.S. and foreign. Librarians are trained in sophisticated information retrieval techniques. These are often thought to daunt untrained users, but librarians revel in them.