Patron Services offers electronic delivery of print journal articles and book chapters owned by Milner Library. Patron Services staff will retrieve materials for which Milner Library has no existing electronic version, scan the material, and deliver to the web as a PDF file.
Who is Eligible?
ISU faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students enrolled in distance education courses who live more than 25 miles from Normal are eligible for electronic document delivery.
All patrons with ISU credentials are also eligible to receive scans of single chapters from items held on Course Reserve. Course reserve scan requests should be placed through the item’s catalog record or this form. Patrons seeking high-resolution scans or scans of personal materials are invited to explore the services offered by Milner Library’s Digitization Center (fees may apply).
Number of Requests Per Day
A limit of five items per patron will be processed per day (until all other requests for the day have been processed).
Number of Pages Per Request
There is a page limit of 30 pages per request. These guidelines exist for several reasons: to assure that requests are processed in a timely manner, to limit the size of email attachments, and to comply with copyright regulations.
Number of Articles Per Issue
Due to copyright regulations, we cannot scan more than two articles per journal issue.
Color Scanning
Requests are typically scanned in grayscale. Campus restrictions on the size of email attachments make delivery of large color files impractical. Color scanning may be specially requested by the patron for articles where color is essential to the article, such as medical or fine arts articles or certain charts and graphs. However we cannot guarantee high quality color images based on the limitations of available scanning technology.
Unfilled Requests
On occasion, a request cannot be accommodated. These situations typically fall into three categories:
- The item is currently checked out to another patron or cannot be located.
- The item is already available electronically.
- The requested material is over 30 pages in length.
When a request cannot be accommodated, Patron Services will contact the patron via e-mail to notify them of the reason and direct them to the print version or provide instructions for borrowing the material from another library via Interlibrary Loan. We cannot guarantee that a lending library will be able to send the material to the patron electronically.
Requests may not be filled if the item’s binding is so tight as to prevent a high-quality scan or if, in the judgment of Patron Services or Preservation staff, materials could be damaged during scanning.
Items Received from Other Libraries
We are not able to scan journal articles and other materials received in print format from other libraries via Interlibrary Loan. We cannot legally reproduce material which we do not own.
Submitting an Electronic Document Delivery Request
- Log on to your Interlibrary Loan account.
- Click on "Article/Chapter."
- Fill out the information as fully as possible so that we are able to quickly and easily locate your item.
- In the "Comments" field, type Document Delivery.
- Click "Submit Request."