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Home BorrowingBorrowing Interlibrary Loan

What are Interlibrary Loans?

Regrettably, the InterLibrary Loans service is only able to process requests for electronic articles and book chapters at this time. This means you will not be able to ask for a physical item from another library.

The British Library are currently running a reduced service, so may not be able to fulfil all requests. All of our ebooks, journal articles and other items are still available via our library online.
If you need a book, journal article or dissertation that we do not stock, our Interlibrary Loans Service can usually obtain it for you from an external library.

Please note that we are unable to provide an interlibrary loans service for students and staff members from Partner Institutions. We advise Partner students and staff to contact their own institution for advice about obtaining interlibrary loans.
Interlibrary Loan requests can be placed for a loan, digitised copy or print copy from books and journals that are:
  • not held at any ARU Library site
  • not available through our Digital Library
  • not available freely via the internet
  • needed for research or study (undergraduate course work would not usually require this service)
If the item you require is held at another ARU Library site, please use the standard Requests service.

We do not charge our customers for Interlibrary Loan requests, but there is a cost to the Library.

Please note that we cannot guarantee that we will obtain a requested item or when supplied items will arrive. We advise customers to place Interlibrary Loan requests as far in advance as possible.

Before placing an Interlibrary Loan request for a postgraduate dissertation, please check that it is not already available from the British Library EThOS service. You will be required to register with the EThOS service if you wish to download the full text of a thesis.

Find out how to submit an interlibrary loan request.
For further information or advice please contact interlibraryloans@aru.ac.uk.
Page Last Reviewed: 2nd August 2018.