![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomFun fact! The catalog page you find if you go to http://library.phila.gov is not in fact the catalog of the Philadelphia library!
I mean, it's not a scam site or anything like that. As far as I can tell it is actually part of the Free Library of Philadelphia's webspace. It's just that when you click on "Welcome to the Free Library's catalog search" from that page and attempt to search the Free Library's catalog, what it searches is not in fact the Free Library's catalog.
I found this out as a result of attempting to search for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
swan_tower's new novel. Not only did the catalog search not find her new novel, but it didn't find any of her other novels either. Or it found a record for one of them, but didn't find any copies of that one. And I found this suspicious because I've checked out and read copies of almost all of swan_tower's novels from the Free Library, so I know it has them. So the next time I was at the library I searched using the computers there and found the book (and all the others).
So! It turns out the library's actual catalog is at http://know.freelibrary.org/. Which, you know, it's totally fine if they don't want to put their catalog at http://library.phila.gov; I just wish they hadn't put something else there that acts like a catalog except for the fact that it doesn't turn up accurate results.
Who knows how many books I've been looking for and assumed the library didn't have because they didn't turn up when I searched for them.
I mean, it's not a scam site or anything like that. As far as I can tell it is actually part of the Free Library of Philadelphia's webspace. It's just that when you click on "Welcome to the Free Library's catalog search" from that page and attempt to search the Free Library's catalog, what it searches is not in fact the Free Library's catalog.
I found this out as a result of attempting to search for
swan_tower's new novel. Not only did the catalog search not find her new novel, but it didn't find any of her other novels either. Or it found a record for one of them, but didn't find any copies of that one. And I found this suspicious because I've checked out and read copies of almost all of swan_tower's novels from the Free Library, so I know it has them. So the next time I was at the library I searched using the computers there and found the book (and all the others).So! It turns out the library's actual catalog is at http://know.freelibrary.org/. Which, you know, it's totally fine if they don't want to put their catalog at http://library.phila.gov; I just wish they hadn't put something else there that acts like a catalog except for the fact that it doesn't turn up accurate results.
Who knows how many books I've been looking for and assumed the library didn't have because they didn't turn up when I searched for them.
