Interlibrary loans

One of the great perks that you get when you become a student at Edinburgh Napier University is access to our library catalogue, which consists of thousands of books and online articles that you can use to help you in your studies. These books and articles can easily be found, requested, and read through our Library Search, which you can access through the tile on your student app or through a web browser.

However, at some point during your studies, you might feel like you need access to a book or article that isn’t part of our library catalogue. In cases like this our Inter Library Loan (ILL) Service has got your back.

Inter Library Loans allows you to request access to books and articles that are not normally part of our library catalogue. You simply submit a request for the material that you need and the ILL team will get in touch with another university in Britain to see if they have a copy that they would be willing to loan us.
Need access to an article from a journal the university doesn’t have a subscription to? Maybe the ILL team can see if there’s a university who can send us a PDF.
Is there a book that would be just perfect to cite in your assignment, but the university doesn’t have it? The ILL team can check if there’s a university close by who’d be willing to send us their copy.

The ILL service is free to use for students and staff at Napier, but please keep in mind that the university is actually paying for this service on your behalf. So only submit a request for material that you’re absolutely certain you need (and try not to request too much at once!)

We should also note that there are some restrictions to what material we can get through ILL. For example, you won’t be able to request copies of dissertations or theses, and we aren’t able to provide you with access to full copies of e-books. However, we can maybe get you a copy of one specific chapter if that is suitable.

Now let’s go over how exactly the ILL service works.

You can find the ILL service through Library Search by clicking the InterLibrary Loans tab above the search bar and signing into your university account.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll have to select what type of material you’re requesting and then fill out a form provide us with information such as the title, author name, and what journal it is part of if you’re requesting an article. If you only need one book chapter, then you might want to let us know the specific pages as well. You’ll also have to select which of our campuses you would like to collect books from. Articles that you request will be sent to your student email address.

Please make sure that you’ve selected the correct option from the top of the page before you fill out the form. Selecting the wrong option will result in the request being rejected, and you will have to resubmit correctly.

Once the request has been submitted, the ILL team will first check if it is necessary for us to get the material through ILL. You’d be surprised at how often people request books through ILL without first checking to see if we already have it in the library!
Many online articles are also available through Google Scholar, so you might want to have a quick check on there before submitting an ILL request.

If the book isn’t available in our catalogue or through Google Scholar, then the ILL team will do a search of our partner institutions to see if any of them have a copy of the material they would be willing to loan us.

For articles and book chapters, these will usually arrive quite quickly as our partners will email them to us in their preferred format – sometimes they send us a PDF, sometimes they’ll send us an encrypted link that can be accessed using a password they provide. We’ll then pass this on to you so you can get to studying!

Please keep in mind that the format the material is provided in is decided by our partner institution, and that these formats sometimes come with restrictions such as links only being accessible a certain number of times or expiring after a certain number of days.

For physical books, we ask that you please be patient and wait at least fifteen days for the book to arrive in the mail from our partner library.
The return date for ILL book is set by our partner library so we ask that you collect the book from your requested helpdesk as soon as you can. You have no idea how many people have come to collect an ILL at the last minute only to discover that our partner library expects the book to be returned to them the very next day!
Once the book arrives it must be collected and returned to one of our library helpdesks during staffed hours (8:45AM to 4:45PM, Monday to Friday) Additionally, ILL books cannot be sent out to you through Postal Loan the way our normal catalogue can be.

As these books are not the property of Edinburgh Napier, we ask that you please be extra careful and look after them when you have them out on loan. Also, you should keep in mind that our partner libraries have the right to recall books at any time. In this case we will email you to let you know when the book should be brought back to us.

This blog post ended up a bit longer than expected, but that’s only because there’s a lot to talk about with our ILL service!
This year alone we’ve supplied over four hundred books and articles to our students and staff through our ILL service, and in turn we’ve lend hundreds of our own books and articles to other universities across Britain.
So why not get involved yourself? It’s a great way to get your hands on some unexpected study material that your classmates might not even know about.

By Matthew Ferrie