Often when I am perusing the library card catalogue, I have wanted to return to the home page for something. When I click on the “home” link it only takes me back to a new search in the card catalogue – NEVER to the homepage. I always have to open a new page and start over just to get to the homepage. What a nuisance! Surely the web master is not aware of this glitch.
Believe me when I say that I feel your frustration. As a librarian I use the catalog extensively and show others how to use it. It would seemingly make more sense for “home” to mean “library home page” and not “catalog home page”. But here’s the glitch.
This catalog is used by all Temple Libraries, Paley, Medical and Law (and soon our Japan campus). So if the “home” link took you to the Paley home page, that wouldn’t work very well for someone at the medical or law library. And as far as I know there’s no way to program it to intuitively know which library you want to be home and there’s not much space at the top for links to all the different home pages. The easy solution is to go to the bottom of the page – not the top. On any catalog page, just scroll to the bottom and you will find a link to the home page of all three libraries. That’s definitely not as intuitive as we like, but it does serve the purpose.
So we are indeed aware of this. However, I’ll bring your concerns to the attention of the web programmer to see if there are other solutions to explore. I guess the other easy solution, if you use the catalog enough and our links at the bottom of the page don’t suit you, is to create a link on the bookmark bar of your browser to the Paley Library Home Page at http://library.temple.edu. I hope you think we deserve a piece of that real estate.
Thanks for sharing your concerns with us.