The Interlibrary Loan department at the Library provides students, faculty, and staff with materials not held by our Library. Other institutions may send their books or scan articles and send them to our Library. We then pass this along to the student. This page provides information on what to expect when using this service.
When requesting items from other libraries, be sure that we do not own the item either in print or in electronic format (e.g. eBooks, PDF). We ask that you limit your requests to 4 requests every other day, or 12 requests per week. This will allow us plenty of time to process your requests and allow you time to interact with borrowed materials before they are due back to the lending library.
Most requests for items arrive 1 to 3 weeks after the request has been made. Journal article requests may arrive a little earlier. How quickly we receive an item here at the Library depends primarily on the speed of the library which we borrow from and the USPS. Distance students may request items to be sent to them. See our Distance Student Guide for more information about this.
The Library does not charge its students, faculty, or staff for this service. Generally, we request items from free lending libraries. However, a particular work may only be held by libraries that charge to lend to other institutions. We will always contact you before agreeing to have these items lent to us. If you agree to pay the cost, we'll request the item from that library and add the charge to your library account.