Fun with Interlibrary Loan

Interlibrary loan (ILL) is just one service the MCLS offers to all its patrons. We can get books, audiobooks on CD, and articles from all over the nation if the Mercer County Library System doesn’t happen to own them! I have been helping in the interlibrary loan office recently and have learned some fascinating things.

We love our fellow New Jersey libraries! They make up the majority of libraries we interact with, both loaning to and borrowing from. There are hundreds of libraries in New Jersey (check out this great list from the New Jersey State Library) so the odds are usually pretty good that we can get an item from a library fairly local to us.

Sometimes, though, we can’t get an item from a New Jersey library. We also borrow from and loan to libraries from all over the United States. The American Library Association has counted over 120,000 libraries in the U.S. so there are a lot of libraries to send requests to! Within a random span of less than 3 months, Mercer County Library System contacted 46 of 50 states! Can you guess which states we didn’t do any interlibrary loaning with? The answer will be at the end of the page marked with an asterisk*. I’ll give you a hint: New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois were the states we interacted with the most, so they won’t be on that short list!

We love sharing our books with other libraries as well! We send items all around New Jersey and the nation so that patrons from other libraries can read books their libraries don’t own. Sadly, we cannot do interlibrary loans outside of the United States; however, we have gotten requests from libraries in Quebec, Canada; Bern, Switzerland; New South Wales, Australia; and Oxford, England! Some of those places would make a long trip for a book to take!

While we would love to borrow and lend anything a patron would like to get, we cannot take requests for most electronic materials, fiction Blu-rays or DVDs, Launchpads, music CDs, Playaways, or video games. We can initiate requests for books, audiobooks on CD, nonfiction Blu-rays or DVDs, and articles from journals or magazines. Patrons may have 3 active ILL requests at one time for physical items. Active ILL requests are requests that are currently processing, currently on hold, or currently checked out. Patrons may also request 3 articles at a time.

Because we don’t know where a book or other item is coming from until a library tells us they can accommodate our request, ILLs can take a while. A local New Jersey library can send us a book quickly, but if that book is coming from Alaska, California, or Florida, the mail can be slow! An ILL item circulates for 4 weeks and sometimes can get a renewal—that decision comes from the loaning library. We do our best to renew our books for another library’s patron, so if you see a book in our system that’s currently checked out, be sure to put your name on the hold list so we can see your interest in that book and get it back so you can read it!

Here at the Mercer County Library, we have hundreds of thousands of items to meet your needs. But when you need something else, we’ve got ILL ready to request your item! If you would like to submit a request for an interlibrary loan, click this link to be taken to the form.

 

*The states that we did not have any ILL interaction with in the 3-month span, either loaning or borrowing, are Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, and Nevada. Maybe tomorrow we will get a new state!

 

--Kimberley at Lawrence