A guy at the library in Dayton told me the books I need for my paper don't exist yet, and he was right
I'm doing a paper on Ohio river flooding and I asked a librarian at the Dayton main branch for sources from the 1800s. He said most of those records were never published in books and pointed me to the county courthouse archives and a digitized newspaper site instead. I wasted two weeks searching the catalog for something that was never there. Has anyone else run into this where the real source isn't a book at all?