While the UMD Libraries own millions of books and other materials, we may not own the specific item that you need at the time you need it. Often your individual assignment will require you to access research materials that are highly specific and may fall outside of our general collection. The good news is that the UMD Libraries has a vast network of library partners both within our Big Ten Academic Alliance and within the general apparatus of research libraries around the world. This is called Interlibrary Loan which is often shorted and referred to as "ILL (eye-el-el)." As a student you too have access to this HUGE world of material! It is simple and most importantly, it is FREE
The videos below provide a walkthrough of the following process of how to access material through Interlibrary Loan (ILL).
Please see the walkthroughs below for information about how to request items through ILL based on the format (books, videos, articles, etc.).
There are a number of ways you may come across a book title that looks appropriate for your work: Google Scholar, mentioned by an expert, hear on the radio/podcast, Amazon recommendation, WorldCat browsing...and so many more including looking at recommendation sites like the New Books Network or Five Books -- I recommend both, by the way)
for this demo, we're going to go on the assumption that we are looking for a specific title*. The processes are largely the same, but we won't concern ourselves with browsing and searching. Please see my other tutorial videos for instruction on this step.
I am going to use the book Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History : Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge England: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Once I have searched for the title of the book and it has displayed in the worldcat search, I can see that it is already checked out. If we did not own the book, it would have said "title available through libraries worldwide" or "title available through BTAA" or "title available through USMAI."
No matter which one of these options is displayed, we can get a copy of the book for you!
Here are the steps:
Click on the book from the catalogue listing to bring up its record:
once you are in the record, click on the "request item through Interlibrary Loan"
After you have clicked on that button, you will be brought to a login screen to determine if you are a UMDCP or other USAMI student
You will also be asked to login using your UMD credentials and Duo authentication (this will depend if you have previously logged in during your session or not)
Once you have logged in, you will be brought to the item request screen. The main bibliographic information of the book will have been imported and the form mostly filled in
Pay specific attention to the boxes highlighted above:
One thing to note here. There is a box for comments -- ignore this box unless you absolutely need the processors to know something about your request! This will slow down your request as it will put it into a queue for review as opposed to pushing it out to the other libraries straight away.
Once you have filled in the request. Hit the submit button.
This will then bring you to your ILL account page where you can make another request and view your requests queue.
When the book arrives you will receive an email to your main UMD email account. You can check out the book using your UMD ID and asking the staff at the front desk for your ILL material. The book will have a plastic slip around it with the information such as the due date and renewal information.
When you return the book, you will receive an email receipt for your records
For steps for requesting chapters and articles, please see the adjacent tabs
Requesting a chapter from a book is a quick and easy way to access ILL material. This is most useful if you know you do not need the entire book. examples would include instances where you only need to read the introduction to understand the author's main idea and to see if it is worth looking at the book in its entirety or if the book is a series of contributions from multiple authors and each chapter reflects an individual study and only specific chapters reflect your needs.
Importantly, you can do this for any book regardless if we own it or not. That means you can do a chapter request of any title that comes up in Worldcat.
The process for requesting the chapter is largely the same as it is for requesting the entire book:
Once I have searched for the title of the book and it has displayed in the Worldcat search, click on the book from the catalogue listing to bring up its record:
once you are in the record, click on the "request item through Interlibrary Loan"
After you have clicked on that button, you will be brought to a login screen to determine if you are a UMDCP or other USAMI student
You will also be asked to login using your UMD credentials and Duo authentication (this will depend if you have previously logged in during your session or not)
Once you have logged in, you will be brought to the item request screen. The main bibliographic information of the book will have been imported and the form mostly filled in
Here is the difference from a regular ILL book request.
Note the button on the top of the request screen that says switch to chapter request
once you click the chapter button, a new field will appear below asking you to enter the chapter title
You can get the chapter listing of the particular book from its Worldcat entry as show below:
Once you enter in this information and fill in the remainder of the required fields (see book request tab) you will hit submit and this will enter your ILL request queue.
You will be emailed a link to the chapter in PDF format as soon as it is available (usually 1-3 days)
For information about journal article requests or book physical item request, please see the adjacent tabs
Journal articles are very easy to reqest through ILL, but there are a couple of different pathways to request them depending on how you come across the article. If you are looking through a database like the MLA International Bibliography, for example, you will see that most articles have a little PDF icon next to the article
This indicates that we have full text access to this article and that it is available immediate as a PDF for download, printing, etc.
If the article does not have the PDF icon, however, it likely means that we do not have immediate access to it.
Click on the article's title to see its full record
Once you have don that, you will see a red button that says "find@UMD"
clicking on this button will search all of our holdings, including other databases to see if this article is available though our system
If it is not available through our holdings, you will see a button that says "request item through Interlibrary Loan"
Clicking on this will bring you to the ILL request form
You'll notice that this is very similar to the request form for the books and physical materials as well as the chapter request form discussed in the adjacent tabs.
All you will need to do here is to ensure the information is correct and fill in the required fields*
Once you submit the request it will enter your request queue and you will receive and email with a link to the PDF as soon as it is available
If you have comes across the article through other means such as through Google Scholar or some other path, you can also take a shortcut to the item request by using the DOI resolver tool.
Through your ILL account, which is available on the main page of the library's website (big yellow button), you will be able to quickly and easily place a new ILL request directly.
Once you have selected the place new article request link, you will be taken to the item request screen we have seen in the previous examples.
As shown in the image above, you can use the DOI (info on what a DOI is here, basically, it is a permanent number assigned to an article that references all the important information about it) resolver to quickly auto-fill the fields
You can find an article's DOI (not every article has one, but most do) either through the database entry for the article, the Google Scholar entry, the journal's information page -- and more)
Copy only the numbers and paste them into the DOI resolver and hit the "Resolve DOI" button
This will fill in all the little information field. All that are left are the required fields for your individual request*
