Requesting a chapter of a book through Interlibrary Loan
During this time when isolation or quarantine can limit our visits to Bracken Library, it's good to know that the library collection can still be accessed.
You can request scanned document delivery of book chapters through the use of Interlibrary Loan (ILL). While you cannot request that we scan an entire book for you (due to copyright restrictions), you can request one or two chapters as long as the pages add up to less than 15% of the book's content.
Here's an example of how you might do that. Imagine you'd found this book in OneSearch:
To find more out about the book title, click on the "Look Inside" link. A pop-up window will open, showing the Table of Contents, as we see here:
At this point, note down which one or two chapters look the most useful. Perhaps you'd have decided you want the first chapter, and Chapter 11 about modernism. In order to request those, first close the pop-up window, and then:
Click on the book title, to bring up the full OneSearch record.
Click on the "Request the item with Interlibrary Loan" link towards the bottom of the record to place a request for a scan of a couple chapters from the book.
A window will open up, asking you to log in with your BSU username and password.
- If you're new to using Interlibrary Loan, you'll have to fill in a brief form with your contact information.
Then you'll see a form like this one below:
Much of the form is already filled out, with the identifying information about the book.
You just need to fill out:
- the Chapter Title field -- with the one or two chapters you'd like scanned. It's okay to just specify the chapter numbers.
- the Preferred By Date field -- with the date you'd prefer to have the scans by. Bear in mind library staff have to physically scan the books. (i.e. It will take some time.) As a general rule of thumb: add two days to today's date if you want it very soon.
- the Notes field -- note again the chapters you want. Adding a "please" is optional, but nice.
Then scroll down and click the Submit Request button. 
You will get an email when the scanned chapters are ready, with a link to the scans.
Special things to consider:
- Not all book records in OneSearch have a Look Inside link with the table of contents. In that case, you can either:
- See if you can find a table of contents for your book online by Googling the title, OR
- Type "Please send me the Table of Contents" in the notes field of the Interlibrary Loan request, and a scan of the table of contents will be send to you so that you can choose the chapters you want.
- Remember that copyright restrictions make it impossible for us to scan the entire book and send it to you. We are limited to scanning less than 15% of the book's pages.
Questions? Use the Ask a Librarian page to get help!