In response to COVID-19, most Law Center and Library staff are working remotely. Other universities or institutions and their libraries have followed a similar safety protocols and have closed their buildings, reduced their on-site ILL staffing, or closed off access to their physical collections.
This means that:
- No physical items can be borrowed via Interlibrary Loan. (Requests for entire books will be converted to e-book license acquisition if possible.)
- We cannot recommend that you visit a local library to make scans of materials yourself.
- It's more difficult to find libraries that may carry a needed title and happen to have the ILL capacity to make scans for us.
- Scans of citations that only exist in microfilm format (such as older newspapers) would be difficult, or maybe impossible, to obtain at present.
- Lengthy scanning requests (exceeding 40 pages or more), which were not accepted under normal circumstances, will not be considered by potential suppliers (these requests will be converted to e-license acquisitions).
- Other ILL offices, even if staffed, do not have the capacity to perform research on our behalf and cannot accommodate requests to peruse an entire work, or microfilm, in order to locate an obscure citation.
- It is more difficult for ILL offices experiencing reduced staffing to process complicated scanning requests, e.g. scans of a book's front matter plus non-consecutive pages. To locate front matter pages (e.g. title page, copyright page and table of contents), resort to the publisher's website or the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon.com.
- There may be a greater probability that you will have to resort to the author for a copy of a cited source. However, please do not submit an ILLiad request if you have already contacted the author for a copy so that we do not waste a potential supplying library's limited staffing and time.
Your patience and understanding are appreciated.