Worst Website EVAR

Today, I tried to use my library's website to request a book. Daniel asked me about zombies and vodooism and I mentioned the book The Serpent and the Rainbow, which I read many years ago and enjoyed immensely. I checked my local library, Jones Library, which didn't have it. So I clicked on the "Virtual Catalog" button to request it, and was taken to THE WORST WEBSITE EVAR: the new old C/W Mars website -- Powered by Dynix!

It requires you enter your library card information and pick your local library to do anything. There's no way to get the site to remember your info, so you have to do this every time you come here which, as you'll learn, you'll probably have to do several times. You click to the next screen and are taken to a butt-ugly frames-based site with revolting garish colors and cheap Web 0.95 graphics that look like they're straight out of the 1980s: I saw prettier websites using Mosaic. You have to click an ugly little graphic to do anything at this point: conduct a search or review your requests. So you conduct a search. There's a field, some radio buttons (title, author, etc) and a pop-up menu with only one choice: Virtual Catalog. You click an ugly little graphic to "begin searching"

At this point, I made a typo in the title (serpent and the rainbox :-). I tried to hit the back arrow and discovered you can't do that. None of the browser cache pages are valid. So I had to start over.

I got back to the same point, typed in the correct name, and what it returns is a weird list of the libraries that matched the string formatted as a simple HTML table (no links), and below that is a table with various entries some of which seem quite unrelated to the search (e.g. "Teeny Tiny and the Witch Woman"). I see the one that looks most likely and click it to make sure it's what I'm looking for: the book by Wade Davis published in 1985. It says there are 13 matches. It is the right one, so I look in a popup menu for the catalog that seems like where I want to request it from: C/W Mars Western Mass libraries is there, so I choose that. It shows me that it's available at four Western Mass libraries: Forbes, Longmeadow, Berkshire CC, and West Springfield. I click Request and it says,

Problem: The item you have requested already exists in your local library. The system is configured to prevent you from making an inter-library loan request for an item that is available at your local library.

But it's NOT! I searched Jones FIRST. Then I try to click its "back" button (having learned to not use my browsers back button) and discover it's Javascript based, which I use No-Script to block (and if you have any sense, you'll do so too). So I turn Javascript on from flo.org and it says it has to reload the page and BAM, 404's in every frame. Again.

So I go through the whole thing one last time to write this. Now javascript is turned on. I click the "return to the previous screen" and it says:

Document Expired
This document is no longer available.
The requested document is not available in Firefox's cache.

Heh.

Alisa was mocking me the whole time I'm struggling with the website. Using her iPhone, she logged in and requested it for me: it turns out that you can search C/W Mars from within the Jones Library interface: the mistake I made was trying to use the "Virtual Catalog" link. Sheesh. Worst Website EVAR!