Interlibrary Loan

ILL is a service provided to students and faculty of Southern Wesleyan University to borrow books, articles, and other materials not included in our library collection.  Before requesting an item through ILL, please check SWUcat, PASCALcat, and/or ONEsearch first to make sure Rickman Library or another library in South Carolina can not supply the item you need. 

Some items that may be hard (or impossible) to obtain through ILL include: recent popular fiction and bestsellers, dissertations/theses, audio-visual materials, and genealogy materials.  We do not borrow or lend textbooks.

The library does not borrow required textbooks via ILL. Why?

• ILL services are intended to assist students and faculty with the short term borrowing of supplementary materials that they might need for class related research, but which are not owned by Rickman library.

• Purchasing textbooks is part of usual college expenses, along with paying tuition and dorm/rental expenses, buying school supplies, a parking pass, and a meal plan.

• Very few libraries have the newest editions as soon as they are printed and required for use by professors for classes.

• Of those libraries that do purchase textbooks, the textbook collection is usually reserved for their campus-use only and are not loaned to other libraries.

• Loaned books usually take one to two weeks to arrive, so students are already far behind in their class work and reading by the time they arrive.

• Students only get to keep a textbook borrowed through ILL for about three weeks.  Because of this, many of our students have given in to the temptation to keep borrowed materials after their due date in order to have them for classes. This creates a very poor testimony for us in the community of libraries with whom we share materials.

                Adapted from https://www.liberty.edu/informationservices/ilrc/library/index.cfm?PID=1860