Saving Your Interlibrary Loan Requests: ILL and Library User Privacy

We are now “delinking” interlibrary loan requests from library user names twice a year. (In January and in the summer.) This means that we will be separating information about request titles from information about who requested them and your ILL account will only include your ILL requests from about the last 6 months.

Previously, you could find a list of everything you ever requested through ILL by logging into your ILL account and clicking on View > All Requests (which includes items currently checked out) or View > Request History. While this can serve as a useful record, we also want to keep information about library requests private; and, the best way to do that is to just not keep information about who requested what once a request is complete. (Or, soon thereafter!)

In 2015, we first “delinked” library user names from ILL requests, keeping only the last three years of requests. Last year, we went through the process again. And, this year we have moved to delinking twice a year, in order to keep ILL request information as private as possible.

How to Keep Your ILL Requests/History

We know that you might want to keep track of all your ILL transactions before they are delinked. To do so, just download your requests by using the instructions below by December 31, 2017.

1. Login to your GC ILL account.
2. Click on View > Request History on the left, which will give you all your finished ILL requests. (Or click on “All Requests” which gives you current requests, as well.)
3. Highlight the fields from “Transaction Number” to “Status” and drag down to highlight your entire list
4. Right click to Copy
5. Open an Excel worksheet
6. Click on the first cell, then right click to Paste, choosing the second icon (Match Destination Formatting).
7. Adjust your column widths, save your file, and you’re done!
8. If you need a convenient way to keep track of all your ILL requests and other citations, use a citation manager like Zotero.

And, if you have any questions, please contact us at ill@gc.cuny.edu

About the Author

Beth Posner is the Head of Library Resource Sharing at The CUNY Graduate Center Library.
https://gclibrary.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2017/11/13/saving-interlibrary-loan-requests-ill-library-user-privacy/
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