Oh the Places Books Will Go

Hello from Interlibrary Loan! Interlibrary loan (ILL) is one of the many services that Mercer County Library System offers. If our library system doesn’t own a book, ILL tries to borrow the book from other libraries around the state or around the nation. We also reciprocate that relationship with other libraries when their patrons would like to read a book their own library doesn’t own.

When we borrow books, we start looking for an available copy in New Jersey first. Sometimes a nearby library like Hamilton Public, Hopewell Public, or Princeton Public kindly lets us borrow a book from them. We love when this happens as it means we can fulfill the request quickly. If there’s not a copy available in a neighboring library, then we look to the rest of the nation for help. We have worked with libraries all across the country! The library we’ve worked with that’s the farthest from us is Fairbanks North Star Borough Public Library, Alaska, which is more than 4,000 miles away from the Lawrence Branch! They also have a branch at the North Pole! (Each dot on the map is a single library we worked with in 2025—a number on a dot means that there are that many different libraries in that city that we’ve worked with.) All together, in 2025, we borrowed from or lent items to more than 1,000 different libraries all over the United States!

When we are lending books to other libraries, requests can come from anywhere. We’ve mentioned Alaska, but we also get requests from states as close as Pennsylvania and New York and as far away as California and Washington. We also sometimes get requests from outside the nation. Last year that list included libraries in Copenhagen, Denmark; Leeds, United Kingdom; Montreal, Quebec, Canada; and Hong Kong! Unfortunately, we cannot accept requests from outside the United States but seeing the different places they originate from is always interesting. The states outside of New Jersey that we’ve worked with the most are New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Arizona, and California.

We love our New Jersey library neighbors! In 2025, two thirds of our loans and borrows were to and from other New Jersey libraries. The closest library to us that we’ve worked with through ILL is Rider University’s Franklin F. Moore Library - less than 2 miles away from the Lawrence Branch! The libraries we worked with most in 2025 are Camden County Library System, Ocean County Library System, and Princeton University Library, with Monmouth County Library System and Hamilton Public Library rounding out the top five.

If you’d like to request an interlibrary loan, click here to be taken to the form. There is fine print, of course. A patron may have 3 ILL books in process at one time and 3 article requests in process at one time. We cannot accept requests for electronic materials (with the exception of articles), fiction Blu-rays and DVDs, Launchpads, music CDs, Playaways, or video games. As you can probably guess from knowing that we work with libraries all over the nation, sometimes an ILL can take some time to get here! Please give us 4 weeks to submit your request and to process it when it comes in. You will then get 4 weeks with your item. We will try to obtain a renewal for an item, if we can, but the library loaning it to us gets to decide. If you have any other questions, please let us know! You can call us at (609) 883-0245 or email us at mclill@mcl.org.

I am usually not a poet, but I love ILL so much, I am moved to verse:

Oh, the places books go and the people that they see!

Interlibrary loan tries to get books for you and for me!

Board books for kids and romance novels galore,

How about a fiction book, one, two, or maybe even more?

We get those books with the teeny tiny print

And the tomes with dust at least an inch thick!

A mystery book on CD to listen to in the car:

Whodunit? Who knows? We haven’t gotten that far!

Oh, the places books go and the people that they see!

Interlibrary loan tries to get books for you and for me!

-Kimberley from Lawrence Branch