SDCL

I love San Diego libraries and the app. Complaints in older reviews seem to have been fixed by now on 2025. Very user friendly! It’s easy to locate materials across the system, to reserve them, to figure out when materials are due, or to put a hold on something. I also like that easy to check branch calendars for events I would like to attend, or check if an event is still happening (better to know about a cancellation before I leave home). Love it!

This new app is prettier than the last one but that’s about all I can say. My main complaint is that it has dumbed down the interface, making it less useful for people who are heavy library users and less accessible for people who rely primarily on their phones instead of a computer. Example 1: There is no way in the app to narrow a search by title, author, or keyword. Searching for a book by an author with last name Grass brings up hundreds of hits about gardening as well. Example 2: There is no way to collapse the search results into a simple text-only list with just the titles. If I will know the title I am looking for when I read it, I don’t need all the pictures and availability details right away. I’m forced to scroll endlessly through multiple screens to get to the book I am looking for. Let me have the option to expand details afterward. Example 3: There is no way in the app to access the Circuit inter-library loan feature. In the old app if a book was not available at SDCL I could search in Circuit. Now I have to go to the web browser to do that. The web browser is also the only place I can narrow searches by title, author or keyword. It’s like they tailored the app for people who are just browsing or want to discover something to read, which is fine, but they took away features for people who know what they are looking for and want to be able to do everything from the app that they could do on the web interface. Don’t they realize how much people do on their phones? This app is making the library *less* accessible than before. I have told my local librarians my concerns and I hope🤞that a future version will include these features for heavy library users who rely on their phones.

One of the basic functions is being notified item is in, why doesn’t the app have basic notifications?