Our interlibrary loans (ILL) service provides access to journal articles, books as well as other items not held in the John E. Robbins Library. The service:

• is available to all Brandon University, Inter-Universities North and Campus Manitoba students, staff and faculty. 
•  is free except in the case of some theses and other costly items. 
• can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, depending on the library supplying us. 

ILLs can be submitted to us via various Databases and Worldcat, as well as via our Online Forms (for information on how this is done see our ILL Flash Tutorial.).  In either case, you will need to use your Brandon University ILL account to do so.  

• For students, this account consists of your Novell Username and 6 digit Password that is assigned to you when you claim your computer account.  If you have not claimed this ID you can easily Claim your ID online from here.  When you do so, please ensure that you record your Username and the six digit Password assigned to you from the login screen.   This will be the ID you use should you wish to place an Inter-Library Loan.   
  • NOTE: Once in RELAIS you can opt to change your password, but should you forget it, you will only be able to learn it again during the Working Hours for the ILL office.  For this reason it is best to keep the password assigned to you from the ClaimID  (as you can access it any time).
  • NOTE:  RELAIS is Case sensitive so please use the UPPERCASE Novel Name when logging in.  The Six Digit number is not an issue.
• Faculty and Staff also have an account which has been sent to you. This will be the ID you use when you login to place a request.
  • NOTE: Once in RELAIS you can opt to change your password, but should you forget it, you will only be able to obtain a new one during the working hours of our ILL office.  If you DO NOT change your password, but forget it, you can obtain it again by contacting our ILL office during its hours of operation or the Help Desk during Library opening hours.  Unlike students you cannot claim it online as there is no CLAIMID for faculty and staff.
  • NOTE:  RELAIS accounts are Case Sensitive and were created in lowercase for faculty.  Please use the lowercase Usernames when logging in.  

If you need any more information about interlibrary loans, please call Carol Steele at 727-7316 or send an email to Steelec@Brandonu.ca.

There are several  kinds of items we can get through interlibrary loans.  Each are discussed below.

Journal Articles

Our interlibrary loans department can obtain a copy of a journal article.

• Before making a request for a journal article, please check our journals list to see if the library has the journal or has access to the full text of the journal. 
• For copyright reasons, we can only obtain one article per issue of a journal. 
• To obtain the article, we need to know the title of the article, the author, the title of the journal, the volume, issue and year of the journal and the page numbers of the article. 
• To place an ILL for a Journal Article click here, select  Request Article, and fill out the Form.  Alternatively, you can place an Article Request from one of our Databases, as demonstrated in our Tutorial.

Note: If you are a distance education student residing in a major urban center with another University (like Winnipeg), please check with the local university to see if the journal your article is in. Because we need to borrow the item from the library and then ship it to you, the interlibrary loan process will be much slower than if you got the article yourself.

Links to various catalogs can be found here.

Books

Our interlibrary loans department can obtain a book from another library. 

• Before making a request for a book, please check our library catalog to see if the library has the book. 
• Because books have to be shipped through the postal system, please allow up to two weeks for us to obtain them. 
• We will contact you as soon as we receive the books. 
• The loan period of ILL books is two weeks after we receive them. In some instances the loan period can be extended. 
• The library reserves the right to charge $1.00 per day for overdue ILL books. 
• We cannot obtain rare books. For copyright reasons, we cannot obtain a photocopy of a complete book. We can obtain a copy of a chapter of a book so long as it is not more than 10% of the book.
• To obtain a book, we need to know the author of the book, the title, the place of publication and the date the book was published.
• To place an  ILL for a Book click here, select Request Book, and fill out the Form; or if you are in WorldCat, you can place a requests from it using the same process you would when placing a request from a Database (as demonstrated in our Tutorial.)

Note: Time restrictions prevent us from obtaining books through ILL for distance education students. However, students residing near another university in Canada can borrow materials from that library if you contact our Off-Campus Library Services and request a COPPUL Card

Theses

A thesis is the written work a student submits as part of a degree program, usually for a master's or PhD degree. 

• Our interlibrary loan department can usually obtain Canadian theses from other Canadian university libraries, but American theses have to be bought for about $50. We will let you know the exact sum before we place the order. 
• To obtain a thesis, we need to know the author of the thesis, the title, the university it was submitted to, the date it was submitted and the type of degree it was submitted for. 
• To place a request for a Theses, click here and use the Request Book Form to submit your Thesis Request.

Other Materials

The library also strives to obtain other types of materials such as music scores, microfilm, and multimedia content - although these items are typically much more difficult to obtain due to restrictive lending policies in other libraries.  If you wish to submit a request for one on these items click here and use the Request Books Form to submit these requests.

Information for Borrowing Libraries

The John E. Robbins Library recently switched over to a new ILL system known as RELAIS.  If you wish to submit requests to us, we ask that you either do so by pointing your ILL systems to our new address, or that you contact us in order to obtain an account and submit your request's here.  To obtain an account, please contact Carol Steele at (204) 727-7316 or send an email to Steelec@Brandonu.ca.