Interlibrary Loan & You (& Me): Fall 2026

This article is from the fall 2026 issue of Hearsay, the semi-annual newsletter of the Wheat Law Library.

Gather ‘round as we learn about the interlibrary loan; chug that Celsius because here we go.

You’re cite-checking an article for Law Review or Law & Public Policy, but the citation is from a title you can’t find on the shelves (I know you looked), in the catalog or through an initial Google search. Or maybe you are doing research for an article set to publish but run into the same problem: that source is not here. Do you stop there, throw your hands up in frustration and decide the title does not actually exist and you should just move to the Azores and forget studying law? That is an option, but you are already here, so another option is using the law library’s ILL service.

ILL is a library service you can use to borrow books, articles and other research materials from libraries outside of KU Libraries. No, not paging an item from Watson or the Annex and having it sent over to the Wheat Law Library so you can devour the contents like the studious law student you are. When you request an item through ILL, I reach out to the network of libraries and institutions outside of the law library and KU Libraries. Amazon can offer two-day shipping, but libraries are not funded like Amazon. For ILL, patience is an important skill that must be cultivated for the ILL’er (me) and the patron (you).

Today, the Wheat Law Library uses an online form that patrons can enter their request into, submit it and then it queues for review and approval. The request must be verified against existing records, located in other libraries that own it and are willing to lend it and go through the shipping, payment and return details. Then we play the waiting game. Will it be here in two days? Six days? Thirty-four days? That is a question I cannot answer. If you think waiting a day or two for your request to be submitted is tedious, Joseph Rowell and the late 1880s would like to enter the chat.
Rowell was a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley in 1886, a time before the polio vaccine, airplanes or Cool Ranch Doritos. He saw that funds were limited, patrons were still requesting access to information not housed in his library, so he reached out to neighboring libraries and asked to borrow that book. Did he know that he was going to change the way patrons use libraries and access information? Did he know that one day he would be responsible for part of my job duties at Wheat Law Library? I don’t know and I’m not allowed to bring my spirit board (Ouija is a Hasbro trademark) to the office anymore, so those questions remain unanswered.

ILL went through its awkward growing stages, from using physical catalogs (like a phone book or Sears catalog, you might need to look those up) to locate the requested item and which library owned it, to calling other libraries on a corded phone using landlines, shifting into FAXing (again, you might need to look this up) and then online access to organizations like the Online Computer Library Center and products like WorldShare. We are still at the mercy of shipping for entire books, and those can take longer than anticipated arriving at the law library. If you only need a portion of the text or a journal article, requesting copies or scans of the article or portion are options and will usually be faster than waiting for the whole book. ILL access to electronic publications is another beast, as full access is usually limited due to publisher licenses, vendor restrictions and download caps.

All ILL in the United States of America is governed by, you guessed it, U.S. Copyright Law. Section 108 identifies the types of copying that libraries can do, and Section 108(g)(2) of the U.S. Copyright Law is what relates to ILL. Title 17 of the U.S. Code covers photocopies and reproductions of copyright material and states that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be “used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research.” If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of ‘fair use,’ that user may be liable for copyright infringement.” Libraries also adhere to CONTU guidelines that limits the number of copies that can be requested from books and recent journals (within the last five years) to five; once you request six, you pay copyright royalties or pay for a subscription to the journal.

After the item arrives you check it out, return it, then another behind-the-scenes process happens. What you need to know is that this is an offering the Wheat Law Library has, that source you needed probably exists and you can get back to being a law student dreaming of that life in the Azores that seemed so possible when you finished reading the first paragraph.
 

Trenton Keim
Circulation & Collections Manager