Electronic delivery of Inter-Library Loans now available

Following a successful pilot, the British Library’s Secure Electronic Delivery service for inter-library loans is now available to all staff and students at YSJ. An email is sent to you by the British Library with a link to download a PDF of your ILL. Electronic delivery of entire books isn’t possible due to copyright regulations, but articles and individual book chapters can be sent to you electronically.

Why get your ILLs sent to you electronically?

• It’s faster than waiting for a paper copy to be posted to you or to be ready to collect
• You can keep multiple copies of the file on multiple devices
• You have a choice of whether to view on screen or print the article

How to request electronic ILLs

When completing the ILL form, simply select ‘Secure Electronic Delivery’ from the list of delivery method options. The articles are in an encrypted format, so to download them successfully you will need to complete the following steps:

• Register for a British Library account, which you will use to log in to your document – just go to http://ondemand.bl.uk/onDemand/home and click ‘Register’
• Ensure that you have Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader 9 or higher installed on the device you want to use to install your ILL – this is free to download from the Adobe website: https://acrobat.adobe.com/uk/en/products/pdf-reader.html

Instructions for downloading the files different devices can be found on the Inter-Library Loans website: http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/information-learning-services/information-learning-services/faqs-for-staff--students/inter-library-loans/electronic-delivery-of-ills.aspx

You can also contact the ILL team on interlibrary@yorksj.ac.uk or 01904 87 6149 to find out more.

Accessible electronics ILLs available for Additional Support users

The standard electronic delivery service is encrypted and a British Library account is needed to access the document. However, if you are an Additional Support user then you may be eligible to receive unencrypted accessible PDFs of your inter-library loans. There is no need to log in to access these documents, and scans have OCR (Optical Character Recognition) applied so that you can highlight and copy text and make comments. The documents are compatible with the Read & Write Gold screen-reading software, available on the York St John student PCs, and are likely to be compatible with other screen-reading softwares.

To request accessible PDFs, you just need to contact the inter-library loans team. You can do so by emailing interlibrary@yorksj.ac.uk, calling 01904 87 6149, adding a note to an ILL request, or just by asking the Service Desk Team or your Academic Liaison Librarian to notify ILL staff on your behalf.