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Research Guides

InterLibrary Loan (ILL)

A Guide to ILL at Wellesley.

ILL Article, Book Chapter & Thesis Information

Have you hit a "pay wall" while looking for the full text or an article or book chapter?  Place an ILL request and we'll try to get it for you!

Articles, Book Chapters and Thesis Requests (PDFs)

  • Usually delivered within 24 hours (depending on availability of request)
  • Emails are sent to your Wellesley address when the PDF is available and delivered to your ILL account.  
  • PDFs are available for 30 days due to copyright.  Please be sure to save them once you open them.

  • Book Chapter requests must be placed individually (one request per chapter) and in accordance with copyright law-must not exceed 10% of the book.

Requesting Articles, Book Chapters & Thesis Requests:

  • Before submitting a request, check if Wellesley already owns the item. You can search the Wellesley Catalog for journal title, book, ebook, or thesis to see if we own the title and what years we have access to.

  • When searching within the A-Z databases or SuperSearch, click on or   to submit a request to ILL. This button will help you find the online full-text article or chapter or will pass the search into an ILL request form.

  • Within your Interlibrary Loan account, you can manually submit a requesting using the Article ILL form, Book Chapter ILL form, or Thesis ILL request form. When completing the forms manually, don't forget to provide a full citation (title, author, year, volume, pages) and to include the ISSN or ISBN number to speed up your request.   TIP: Requesting through SuperSearch or the Databases will import this information into your request automatically! (see Placing an ILL Loan Request in SuperSearch and the Databases on the menu on the left) 

Requesting eBooks

eBook Requests:

  • eBooks are delivered as PDF's to your ILL account.  Emails are sent when available. PDFs are available for 30 days due to copyright.  Please be sure to save them once you open them.

  • eBooks are not always available due to copyright restrictions from publishers

  • Make sure you choose eBook only (PDF) from the dropdown menu. 

Before Placing an eBook Request:

  • Is this already available at the Wellesley Libraries?  Check the Wellesley Catalog or WorldCat.

  • Provide as much citation information as possible (providing the ISBN number or OCLC number will help us process your request faster).  TIP: Requesting through WorldCat will import this information into your request automatically! (see Placing an ILL Loan Request in WorldCat menu tab on the left) 

For help searching databases

For help accessing databases and locating resources, please consider contacting our Research & Instruction Librarians.  

Here are some other resources for research help:

 

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