Sometimes
you need books or articles that our library does
not have in its collection or in full text from
our online services. In that case all current
LEC students, faculty and staff may request
these items through the library's interlibrary loan
service, called ILL for short. We will then
request these items for you from other libraries,
free of charge.
How
ILL Works:
ILL requests are made on this website: use one online
form for books
and another form for articles
and ERIC documents. When you fill out the
form (with as complete information as possible!),
click on the Submit button at the bottom,
and your request is sent as an email message to
our ILL librarian. Once your request is received
the librarian submits this request through the OCLC
ILL system to several other libraries that own the
item you need. The first library that has the item
will then retrieve it from its collection and mail
it to us (some libraries will even fax or email
articles). As soon as the item you requested arrives,
we will send you an email message that your ILL
request may now be picked up at the library's circulation
desk.
How
long does it take to get an item I've requested?
We advise that you allow 5-8 business days
between submitting your ILL request and receiving
it. That said, many libraries typically send materials
much faster than that, and some libraries are now
faxing or emailing articles, which results in next-day
service.
Are
there any limits on what I can get through ILL?
Our library uses OCLC's ILL service for sharing
resources between over 8500 libraries, which
typically provides 95% of the materials requested
by member libraries. Even with this system, however,
there are still limits to what we can obtain from
other libraries:
We
can only obtain ILL materials that libraries that
are willing to share with us: Libraries voluntarily
cooperate to provide ILL service to each other,
and just because a library's online catalog says
it owns an item doesn't guarantee that this library
will loan it to anyone else.
Libraries
are typically reluctant to lend some kinds of
materials: For instance, most libraries will
not loan reference books, even to their
own patrons. As another example, many libraries
prefer not to loan AV materials (CD recordings,
DVD's, videotapes, etc.) through ILL because
these items are more likely to become damaged
in transit.
We
do not borrow from non-OCLC libraries: With
a 95% success rate, the OCLC ILL system serves
our college community very well.
OCLC's
ILL service is based mainly on libraries in the
United States: Although U.S. libraries have
actively shared resources with one another for
decades, foreign libraries have yet to embrace
this concept, and few of them currently cooperate
with OCLC's ILL system.
For
further information: Call the Reference Librarian,
Whitney Harkavy, at 440-375-7403 or send an email
to llibrary@lec.edu
