Books and journal articles not available in our library can usually be obtained from other Washington-area research libraries via interlibrary loan. Delivery time ranges from a few days to several weeks, depending on the nature of the material. In urgent situations, same-day fax or electronic delivery may be possible.

Requests should be submitted to Merri Wolf using the online Interlibrary Loan Request Form, the paper forms provided on the chargeout tables, or by e-mail. A maximum of 6 items per week may be requested.

The library has set up an online order form in GeoRef for interlibrary loan requests. If you find that we don't have the journal or book you need in our library, you can pull up the request form by clicking the "InterLibrary Loan" link on the GeoRef search results screen. All the citation information is automatically transferred from the GeoRef record to the form -- just fill in your name and e-mail address and click Submit.

You can request articles in a similar way using ScienceDirect (Elsevier Science). Each SD article has a link marked "$Order Document." Clicking it will bring up a form you can use to notify the library staff of your request. (You first need to set up a personal userID and password in ScienceDirect to use this feature.)

Please keep in mind that the same limit of 6 requests per week (articles + books) applies to these as to regular interlibrary loan requests.