Undergraduates and Interlibrary Loan

Interlibrary Loan (ILL) can be a valuable research tool for undergraduate students, but since undergraduates often face tight project deadlines, care may be advisable.

Vanderbilt participates in several special initiatives, including Project Athena and Kudzu, which can greatly expand your access to other library collections. These initiatives include easy catalog searching and ILL requesting, expedited delivery, and liberal borrowing policies.

More traditional interlibrary loan service is not always as well suited to the requirements of routine undergraduate coursework, and you may want to inform the instructor when ILL is being used.

Interlibrary loan should supplement, not replace, Vanderbilt's library system. You should choose research topics for which this library owns the basic resources needed -- Reference librarians can provide valuable help. Extensive use of another library's collection may require that you visit that institution, or that your work be spread over time.

The instructor needs to know when ILL is used because:

• some adjustment to the assignment deadline may be required.
• the instructor needs to work with Library bibliographers to develop library collections that support undergraduate assignments.
• the instructor may be familiar with the requested items, and be able to advise on their usefulness to the project.
• the instructor might suggest a different approach to the research, or provide an alternative topic.

Interlibrary loan is most useful for long-term, in-depth research, and is less appropriate for short projects because:

• timing of delivery is unpredicatable, and materials may arrive too late to be useful.
• the user is not likely to be familiar with the materials requested, and may find them less helpful than expected once they arrive.
• undergraduate investigations generally do not require exhaustive discovery of sources. When the VU Library collections provide inadequate resources, a change of topic may be more practical for short projects.
• loans obtained through ILL may not be put on reserve or otherwise shared by groups.

Whenever undergraduates do want interlibrary loan service, we will do everything we can to make the experience a positive and productive one.

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