Fun fact

[dr_whom]

Fun 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 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.

Comments

[zdenka]

Librarian powers: activate!

When I go to the library home page and click on the hypertext in "search our catalog" or use the search box on the screen, I get the know/freelibrary link. If I click on "classic catalog" from there, I get a catalog/freelibrary link. So it looks like they've updated their catalog, though it's odd if the "classic" link isn't turning up the same items. Did you have the older link bookmarked?

[zdenka]

Update: And using either the new or the "classic" catalog finds books by what I have deduced swan_tower's real name to be. So . . . old bookmark?

[dr_whom]

Old bookmark, yes! And, like I say, I don't object in principle to the library moving their catalog to a new URL... but it seems not-quite-cricket for them to leave a non-functioning catalog up at the old URL without any kind of obvious label.

[zdenka]

*nod* It might be worth e-mailing someone at the library to point that out, if you feel like making the effort. I would care about fixing it if I were working there as a librarian, but I am a compulsive wannabe-cataloger and not all librarians are like this.

[dr_whom]

Worth a try, perhaps!