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Graduate Student Guide to UMass Lowell Library Services

Using Interlibrary Loan

Interlibrary Loan is the way that the library gets the full text of articles which it does not own, usually producing your articles within 24 hours.

When material is not available in our full text databases, students may use Interlibrary Loan to request it from another library. When you search the catalog, you are simultaneously searching UMass Lowell material, the collections of our partner libraries in the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), and libraries worldwide. Results are listed by availability so the items that can be in your hand most quickly appear first.  You will be able to see which group holds an item in the first level of results. It will appear in green text as “Libraries that own this item”.

To use Interlibrary Loan you must be logged in to the library and have an additional account specific to ILL. You can create an ILL account from the page linked here.

For information about how to use Interlibrary Loan, see this guide.