Intercampus Loan, Interlibrary Loan, and Document Delivery - What's this?

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Intercampus / Interlibrary loan (ILL), and Document Delivery is a service that we provide to our students and faculty. We request books or photocopies of documents that are owned by another library on their behalf. I guess you could say that we act as an intermediary; we locate a desired item, place the request, receive the item, check the item out to our student for a period of time, and then we return the item to the owning library. We usually only have requests for books and journal articles; however, other libraries may lend out other items such as audio and video recordings, maps, and microforms. These types of items may have a cost associated with them that we paid on behalf of our students and faculty.

Interlibrary loans consist of two actions: borrowing and lending.

As the borrowing library another library will fulfill our request by sending materials to us or will provide us with a reason why they cannot provide the requested materials.

As a owning library we send out items to other libraries who request to borrow or photocopy materials that are required by their patron. If it’s a case of an Intercampus Loan (loans between campus libraries across the island), these requests are quickly filled and the item requested is usually received within days. Interlibrary Loan requests between different libraries, on the other hand, may take weeks for the item to arrive at its destination. We use Canada Post to deliver our books or if it’s an emergency situation, we’ll ship via a courier service. Any photocopy requests are processed immediately via fax or scanned and sent electronically.

We take part in ILL because, honestly, we cannot afford to purchase every book that is required by our students and faculty, nor do we have the space to store an unlimited number of books and materials. As an academic library we house books and materials that are relevant to our programs of studies; however, there have been occasions when our patrons require materials outside the box. This is where ILLs come into play for our library.

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[1] Interlibrary-Loan.gif.  Interlibrary Loan.  Arapahoe Library District.  Web.  02 Nov 2010.