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Interlibrary Loan Services

Interlibrary loan serves to expand the range of publications available to the LIU Riverhead community. Administrators, faculty, staff, and students may request that publications not owned by Riverhead be borrowed from other libraries on a local and national level. Arrangements for borrowing can be made online through the book request form and periodical request form. When filling out these forms, always provide the source of your citation. The source may be a database, a published abstracting service, or a footnote in another publication. Please include both the name of the source and the citation number or page number where you found the citation.

Time Factors

The time needed to fill interlibrary loan requests varies greatly, and it is often difficult to predict how much time will be needed. Books and articles owned by other campuses of Long Island University can usually be obtained within a few days. Please allow at least three weeks for delivery of material not owned by Long Island University. Interlibrary loan periods are determined by the lending library.

Costs

In most instances, the LIU Riverhead Library is able to absorb the costs associated with obtaining books and articles on interlibrary loan. When the costs are unusually high, the staff of Interlibrary Loan will ask the requester whether or not the requester would be willing to pay the costs, or whether the request should be cancelled.

Limitations

It is often difficult and in some cases impossible to borrow certain kinds of library materials on interlibrary loan, since most libraries either do not own or do not lend such items. Items generally not obtainable on interlibrary loan include: rare books, manuscripts, reference books, books about genealogy, audiovisual materials, entire issues of periodicals, scholarly books published during the current year or in some cases the previous year, theses, dissertations, and new textbooks. If you are in need of such items, please speak to the reference or the interlibrary loan staff.

The interlibrary loan staff must abide by federal copyright law. See the statement appended to the bottom of the book request form or the periodical request form.

For additional information, please call Interlibrary Loan at 516-299-2898 or email Interlibrary Loan at post-interlibraryloan@liu.edu.