Interlibrary Loan (ILL) is a cooperative agreement among library institutions that allow libraries to borrow materials from each other for the benefit of their patrons. Copyright guidelines govern the amount of journal articles, books, and other copyrighted materials libraries participating in ILL agreements can borrow.
"The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted materials. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is 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. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgment, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law."
Electronic ILL materials are for the requester alone. Downloading the article you requested for your own personal or academic use is acceptable as "fair use", but further distribution may violate copyright law.
Most libraries will not lend an entire journal volume or issue, but may provide photocopies of individual articles. When requesting a journal title not available in the LRC catalog, please include article information.
Libraries generally do not lend non-circulating materials, reference books, audio visual, DVD's, whole magazines, journal issues, and entire e-books.
There is no fixed limit on the amount of Interlibrary Loan materials a patron can request. However, the "Rule of Five" applies to articles requested for the same journal. For scanned pages of a book, one chapter or up to 10% of the book's total page count can be requested. Electronic books are limited to the amount of chapters that can be requested. If multiple chapters are needed, we suggest requesting an entire hard copy book or submit a purchase request via the LRC website to see if the LRC can acquire a license to the e-book.
The CONTU Guidelines place strict limits on the number of articles a library may borrow from a given journal ("the rule of five") and require that copyright fees be paid when those limits are exceeded.
"Rule of Five" or "5/5/1 Rule" for Borrowing Library
Interlibrary loan requests for articles from a journal title published fewer than five years before date of request must not exceed more than five article from the single journal title in a calendar year.
5: No more than 5 articles
5: in the last 5 years
1: from 1 specific journal title in 1 calendar year
"Rule of Two" for Borrowing Library
Interlibrary Loan requests are permitted for one article, per issue, per patron without requesting copyright permission. Only one copy of the same article from a journal can be requested as an Interlibrary Loan per patron. Copyright permission and any applicable fees are required for the second and subsequent copies.
