About Interlibrary Loan Service

Location: Room 608 - Central Library
Phone: 322-2408 -- Fax: 343-7276 -- E-Mail:
Hours: Monday - Friday, 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

WELCOME TO INTERLIBRARY LOAN SERVICE (ILL) at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library. Vanderbilt faculty, staff, and currently enrolled students, and their spouses or domestic partners, can use ILL to obtain loans or copies of items that the Vanderbilt University Libraries do not own.

Faculty Delivery Service: Faculty can also use the ILL system to request campus or electronic delivery of Vanderbilt Library materials.

You may log in to your personal, secure online account for request forms. Also, the "Find it @ VU" menu and many of the databases and catalogs provided by the Library include an ILL request option. Please make a separate ILL request for each book title, journal article, or other item that you want. You do not need to know which libraries have an item, but accurate and complete bibliographic information speeds processing.

Borrowing Service: We can usually borrow from other libraries the kinds of materials that would circulate here: books and reprints, scores, proceedings, etc.. Whole periodical volumes, reference books, current textbooks, rare or fragile items, and very old or very recent or popular titles may be difficult to obtain. Loans generally take 1-2 weeks to arrive (but delivery time varies widely). We will email when your loan is available. The use period and any renewal is set by the lending library.

Copy Service: We can request copies of journal articles and many other items that cannot be borrowed. Copy service is subject to copyright laws and guidelines for fair use of copyrighted materials. Articles typically arrive within a week (some are faster, some take much longer), and are delivered electronically whenever possible.

Following Up On Your Requests: You can log in to your online ILL account to see the status of your outstanding requests. Occasionally we must ask numerous libraries before we can find one able to supply what you need -- we will give up only if we reach a "dead end" or if your deadline passes. We will notify you if we cannot satisfy a request. Please contact us at or 322-2408 with any questions, problems or comments.

The Vanderbilt Eskind Biomedical Library and Alyne Queener Massey Law Library provide separate interlibrary loan services for the VU medical and law communities. Non-Vanderbilt library users and staff may see our ILL lending policies here.