Speaker 1: Welcome, I'm Marjorie Ramsey and I'm a reference and public services librarian at DSU. Today we're going to look over the interlibrary loan request process. So what is an interlibrary loan? ILL or interlibrary loan is a free service that allows DSU scholars to access books, articles, and resources from libraries worldwide. This can be used by all of our scholars whether you are residing on campus, commuting, or online and all over the world. While the library subscribes to many resources appropriate for our scholars, ILL can be a very useful tool when you want to dive deep into your research. When using ILL you're welcome to request articles or ebook chapters or chapters from print books. If you request those they're emailed to you as a PDF and they usually take about one to three days to receive, a little less than a week. If you're requesting a print book to be sent in the mail, print books are mailed to the William C. Jason Library on our main campus for you to pick up. These take a little longer than a week to receive on average and this is generally only accessible for scholars who are on campus. However, our online and distant students are welcome to request books through this method and we're happy to scan or copy a chapter or a section of the book for you and send it to you as a PDF. However, do bear in mind that if you are requesting a print book by mail it will still take over a week or so for the book to arrive at the library. So let's look at the process for requesting an interlibrary loan. In this example I've used our main search bar to look for articles about gifted education teaching. As you can see in my filters on the left-hand side of the screen I have left the libraries worldwide box checked. Had I switched it to Delaware State University my results would only show materials that are available at DSU. By keeping it at libraries worldwide I'm able to explore a little bit more of what's out there. Looking at my results I see the first article and the second article have direct links to view the full text. So those are things that we subscribe to at DSU. However, this third article does not have one of those links and only says that it's available at other libraries worldwide. If I click on the title and decide that this is something that I would like to read for my research there's now a button that says request item through interlibrary loan. After clicking on that request button I'm able to see most of the information about the article has already been filled into these boxes. At the top here I see a few options. Article is one, book is another if this were a book, and then I have other for other types of materials such as audio CDs, DVDs, and other media. I'm going to go back to article because this is an article from a journal and I'm going to check that the information has been filled out correctly. This is the title of the journal itself, the date that the article was published, which is fairly recent April 30, 2024, the volume and issue for that journal article, the pages where the article can be found, and here is the full title of the article itself and its author. ISSN is sometimes filled out automatically and sometimes I have to go fishing for it. This stands for International Standard Serial Number and I may be able to find that if I go back to the record but sometimes it's not there. However, I do see that this has a little asterisk next to it which means I have to put something for my request to go through. If you don't know the ISSN or you can't find it, you still have to put something in the box. It's perfectly okay to put a question mark or an NA, not applicable if you're unsure because a librarian will be looking this over before it goes out into the world. And then about your request, for an article I'm going to put service type as copy which means I simply need a copy of this material to be sent via email as a PDF. Copy is appropriate for articles, it's appropriate for chapters of ebooks, and it's appropriate for chapters of print books which can be scanned by the owning library and sent to us via email. Loan is appropriate if it is a print book that we would like to have sent in the mail to be received at William C. Jason Library on the main campus. So since this is an article I'm going to leave it a copy. And then there's the needed before date. If I look at today's date and I know that I have a paper due tomorrow, I might put in that I absolutely need this article by tomorrow so I can read it, consider it, analyze it, and then write about it in my paper. However, since most of the articles are sent within a few days after the library receives the request, this isn't a very helpful choice. Ideally you're going to be searching for these articles a little while before your research is due. For articles I often say need in about a week, but if you're really not that concerned about when you receive it and if you don't really need it for another month, you're welcome to pick a date that's further in the future. If I'm requesting a book to be sent in the mail, it is absolutely not going to get here in the next couple of days. I would need to select at least a week. And again, if it's something that you don't need this week or next week but you would like within a month, you're welcome to pick a date that's a little bit later. Again, books do take about a week to arrive in the mail if you're selecting a loan for a full print book. So I'm going to put that I'd like this article in about a week. Comments are appropriate if there's a certain portion that you know you need, if there's a certain edition that you know you need, if there's a little bit more about the resource that you would like to put in there. It's also appropriate if you're unsure of what you need from a certain book, instead of putting a title of article, to put say the table of contents or other information from that journal or from that book that you'd like. And you can put there in the comments that you'd just like the table of contents please. And then if I scroll down just a little bit further, it's going to ask me where this is going to be sent. First name, last name, a D number, and your DSU email address. And then I can go ahead and click submit request. And after clicking submit request, that request is going to go to the DSU librarians in order for us to process it and make sure that we're requesting it from institutions most likely to have this available. So that's the ILL request process if you are selecting something from a search in the library's main search. But what if it's an article that you found out in the wild? Many of our scholars like to use search engines such as Google Scholar in order to start finding resources. And you may also find appropriate references at the ends of journal articles you've already read or heard about them through another method. If you're using Google Scholar, the search engine, you might find that some of the materials there are open access and freely available. You might find that some can be clicked through to access them from a DSU database, but you're probably going to find that a lot of the materials on Google Scholar are only available in other libraries databases. And if you try accessing them, you're going to hit a paywall. Many of these articles can cost as much as 50, 60, or even $70 in order to access. So please do not pay money for just one article if you haven't tried requesting it through Interlibrary Loan. This is a wonderful tool if you're doing your research in advance and you find things on Google Scholar or otherwise out in the wild that you're interested in. So if you're not clicking through from a library search, let's see how you are going to be able to access Interlibrary Loan. So if you found an article out in the wild or using Google Scholar, you'll simply have to start on our Interlibrary Loan main page. This gives you a little background information on what an Interlibrary Loan is and how to request it, and then we'll click this link here to open up the form. Since this is under my name, you can see I have a wide variety of materials already listed, and you'll see the Create Request button at the top, and that will once again open up that same form, only this time you are going to have to fill in all of the information from whatever resource you found it. So if you found it on Google Scholar or elsewhere, you can simply copy and paste and move information over. Again, this can be done for an article, or it can be done for a book, or it can be done for another type of material. The more information that you're able to fill out, the easier it's going to be for the librarians to make sure you can access the appropriate material. So let's look at how to retrieve an article after you've requested it. As soon as you complete your request, you will receive an email from William C. Jason Library letting you know that your request is in progress. When the article becomes available, you'll receive another email from William C. Jason Library that contains a long link and a case-sensitive password. In this example, you can see the title of the journal and the article title at the top, letting me know which of my articles is now available, and you can see a very long link next to Is Available At. Just hidden below that is a case-sensitive password. In order to retrieve the article, I'm going to have to first copy that case-sensitive password before I open the link. Once you click on the link, then you paste the password when prompted. Because the password is a little bit varied, a lot of folks miss this step, so make sure that you are copying that little password before you click on the link to access the article. Every single article request is going to come with a unique password and a unique link. Also highlighted down at the bottom there is an email reminder that says that this is going to be available to you for 30 days or 5 views. So that means if you click on the link, use the password, you see that it's available, and you think, okay, now I know where to get that later, that's fine, but you're only going to be able to do that four more times. So we strongly recommend that the first or second time you use that link to open up your article, you download it and save it to a device so that you're going to have access to it permanently. If you find that you are no longer able to access something, we can certainly re-request it, but it is going to be that full process of waiting for it to arrive. I hope this has been helpful. Please reach out to us anytime if you have any questions about how to use Interlibrary Loan or if you have questions about a specific library loan request. Thank you and have a great day.