Interlibrary Loan

Have you ever heard of Interlibrary Loan? It's when two or more libraries have an agreement to share their stuff with each other. It can be between school and university libraries, public libraries or special libraries. In Santa Cruz we do not have an interlibrary loan (ILL) agreement, but we can now "borrow" things from the Library of Congress in the US! The Library of Congress has put digital resources on their website for anyone to use. The resources are PDF versions of the original documents. All of the documents are in the public domain which means that they are free for anyone to use, and mostly older resources.

If you are interested in this resource, check out the Library of Congress's Digital Interlibrary Loan. This resource will be especially useful for people interested in history.

Interlibrary loan is an incredibly useful tool for university students. If your library doesn't have the resources you need, you can borrow books from almost anywhere in the United States, and even some international libraries. Also, it's a good way to save money on text books...instead of buying 15 books for a class, you can borrow them from another library and read what you need before returning them!