Pre-emptive digital strikes, etc.

I keep forgetting that before I call something up at the library, I should check whether or not the text exists in an online database somewhere--especially since more and more relatively ephemeral items are wending there way into GoogleBooks et al.  And, of course, just searching GoogleBooks alone doesn't work, as the item might be in archive.org or HathiTrust.   This happened to me twice today, once with a tract by the Scottish novelist Catherine Sinclair, and the second time with an autobiographical sketch by the Protestant-Catholic-Protestant-Catholic-ad nauseam journalist J. M. Capes. 

Now, if only I could have found The Last Days of Father Denis--an Irish Protestant tract that veers unpredictably from broad comedy to hellfire and brimstone--online, because it was impossible to keep the book open properly to do any note-taking, and the NYPL main reading room...apparently has never met book cradles and snakes? Seriously, what's going on with that? Are all the snakes living in another reading room somewhere? (Or was it just my luck that the kid working at the counter had never heard of such things?)