Finding Books
How do I find my book?
To search for books in the Mid-Manhattan History Department, you will need to visit the LEO Catalog of the NYPL Branch Libraries. To begin searching the catalog, first start at www.nypl.org:
Now click Circulating (LEO). This will take us to the LEO Catalog:
In looking up a book, we can select what field we would like to search such as: Author, Title or Keyword. We’re going to perform a title search for 1776 by David McCullough as a Title search (and click GO):
Here is a listing of all the titles that begin with 1776:
As you can see, this is a common title for a book. There are 19 items throughout the New York Public Library with the simple title of 1776–we’re going to investigate these by clicking on that first link.
This is what we find:
The New York Public Library is a big system (86 branches throughout Manhattan, Bronx and Staten Island), how do we know which of these titles are in the Mid-Manhattan History Collection? And, how can we find out about the book version of 1776, rather than, say, an Audio Casette or DVD?
To clean up our results, we can use the Limit By drop-down box to focus our search:
After we limit our list by Mid-Manhattan and Books/Paperbacks we are left with 5 titles, all books and all found at Mid-Manhattan Library:
The first item is the book version of 1776.
The results screen here now provides us with the Title, Author, Call Number and Material Type (i.e. Book, DVD) to each of the 5 items.
For any item, it is important to pay attention to Reservable Copies:
This number tells us how many copies of the item are available throughout the entire New York Public Library System. NYPL owns 129 copies of this title–so this book is widely available.
Number of Holds informs us of how many people are waiting in line for the item:
1 hold exists for this title. So if you were to request this item, you would not have to wait long, only 1 other person is in line for a book that is available in abundance.
If you would like to have the item available for pick-up at any branch location in Manhattan, Bronx or Staten Island, simply click on the “Request Item” button and have both your Library Barcode and PIN Number available:
TIP: If you don’t know your PIN Number you can visit any branch library for that information
To further investigate the item, click on the title to check its availability at Mid-Manhattan Library. We want to ensure that a copy of our book is available on the shelf:
Now we see:
If we look at the bottom of our screen we are presented with the availability of 1776 throughout the branch libraries, but we’re interested in the Mid-Manhattan Library. All branches are listed alphabetically:
The libraries are all listed alphabetically. We need the M’s for Mid-Manhattan Library. If we dig deeper into our results and click on page 4 we retrieve:
(finally!) We see here that at least one copy of this title exists at call number 973.3 M on the 5th Floor of the HIST Non-Fiction (that’s History Non-Fiction…) and is checked in.
