Inter Library Loans

Inter Library Loans is a special service which helps staff and students obtain material that is not held by the University of Aberdeen's Library.

Through the national Inter Library Loan network the Library is able to borrow items and obtain scans from other libraries in the United Kingdom and abroad.

The Inter Library Loan service is available to all staff and students at the University of Aberdeen. The Library covers the cost of this service. Please be aware that we incur an individual charge for all physical items, so we reserve the right to limit the number of free requests per individual if items are requested and not collected.

The Library receives a small number of requests for items from overseas; these will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis and may incur a charge. We will contact you for further information in these instances.

External members of the library may also use this service but will be required to purchase vouchers to pay for requests, as may corporate members. Further information about charge is available under the Inter Library Loan charges tab.

Please make sure that you have checked Primo before you submit a request. When checking for journal articles remember to check the Coverage in Primo.

This is a statement indicating the volumes and years held by the library and appears as follows:

Coverage

• Library holds Library has v. 1, no.1 (May 1970)-v. 18, no.4 (1987)

The British Library EThos service provides a national record of doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions. There are approximately 500,000 records on this database and around 260,000 full-text theses.

It is possible to order scans of print only theses via the digitisation-on-demand service offered by the British Library, however this can incur a charge of up to £40. If a particular doctoral thesis is not available in electronic format you can submit an Inter Library Loan request to try to borrow the printed copy.

Further information is available on the EthOS website.

ProQuest Theses must be applied for directly by the individual: https://dissexpress.proquest.com/search.html

Legislation from the European Parliament, means that requests for copies can only be processed if the end user has signed a declaration that the copy is for private study or research that is not for a commercial purpose. For more details see the British Library website.

Any reader who feels that he/she cannot in good faith sign this declaration can get in touch with us (Inter Library Loans team); copyright fee-paid articles can be obtained on payment of the publisher's copyright fee.

If you wish to include an extract from a book or journal which is not available in the Library, you should request this via your online module reading list. The Library will then check that this is covered by the CLA Higher Education Licence; for items covered by this licence we will obtain a copyright fee-paid copy of the item and add this to your list. The Library will contact you regarding any items we cannot procure to discuss alternative access routes.

If you require a copyright fee-paid copy for purposes other than adding to your reading list, the Inter Library Loan form on Primo should be completed as normal and select Copyright fee-paid copy required.

Articles and book chapters are delivered electronically as default, where available, for you to print. This service means quicker and more flexible access to documents via your University of Aberdeen email address, wherever you are.

We have recently joined the RapidILL service which allows faster access to journal articles and book chapters, often within 24hrs Monday - Friday, 9am - 5pm.

When your requested document is available you will receive an e-mail direct from the British Library providing a link to an encrypted PDF file, using a service called DRM Lite. To open the document you will need to register for a British Library account. British Library On Demand home page.

Select Register in the top right hand corner and follow the instructions for registering an account. You will require your account username and password to access your documents, so keep the details safe. Please ensure that your username does not include the @ symbol as this may cause the document to fail to open. There is a 15 minute delay between registering and the account becoming active, so if you can't access the documents first time, try again later.

To open the file on your home computer or personal laptop, you will need to make sure that you have Adobe Reader version 10 or higher installed. This is available on all classroom PCs.

Please note the conditions of Secure Electronic Delivery:

• Electronic documents are available for download for 30 days after which the link expires
• You may print the document only once - you are advised to print a copy as soon as you download the document.
• Copies of the document may be saved to more than one device and accessed by logging in with your British Library account details. The document is locked to your account and cannot be opened by other browsers.
• Documents are supplied subject to the usual UK copyright restrictions.

Please note that articles and book chapters may be supplied electronically but not whole publications.

We can provide loans and scans from our collections to libraries in the UK.

Most material is available for loan except the following:

• Heavy Demand Collection
• 3-day loan material
• Audio-visual material
• Microform material
• Reference material
• Teaching Resource Collection material
• Special Collections material