Only a small portion of the collection is available onsite at the Commonwealth Keystone Building. State Library staff may only retrieve items about once a week from the Forum Building.
Therefore, all items must be requested at least one business week before a visit to the library. Unfortunately, construction schedules may prevent access to parts of the collection. State Library staff will try to notify visitors in advance if an item is unavailable.
A small number of library materials were moved from the Forum Building to the Commonwealth Keystone Building. These do not need to be requested in advance:
- Genealogy: Materials from Pennsylvania's counties, including cemetery listings, immigration indexes, baptismal, marriage or other listings, city directories microfilm, and genealogy/local history microfiche.
- Law: PA Code, Purdon's, PA Bulletin from 1971-1994, selected Pennsylvania Bar Institute materials.
- General reference: Selected reference materials, mostly resources for librarians to assist the public with searches.
- Government documents: Only those documents acquired during the renovation period (2019-2021).
- Electronic resources: Access to all electronic resources, including Ancestry.com and Westlaw.
- Newspapers [Microfilm]: Selected newspaper microfilm.
- Newspapers [Print]: Daily newspapers, with a few months of backfiles.