I detest it when interlibrary loan gives me a 1,038-page book for 5 days with no renewals. What am I supposed to do with it in 5 days? Celebrate its existence?
I could read 1,038 pages in 5 days but only if I did absolutely nothing else.
1,038
Opinions, art, debate
Clarissa's Blog 
I know. I don’t get to use other people’s scholarship unless I ILL basically everything. It’s rare when we actually have the books/articles that I need. I have ILL books for as short as 5 days and as long as 4 months, but really, I want them all in MY library, so I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m going to have time to read or photocopy from them. I need to make my research assistants photocopy what I need, but last time I did that, they left off the page numbers. Bah!! How am I supposed to cite? I guess I’ll have to ILL those books again. 😦
LikeLike
Our library is also very poor. They are balking even at buying my book, and I’m faculty. It’s slowing down everything to fight with the ILL.
LikeLike
That’s dumb. Isn’t the standard loan period three weeks? Why in the world are they only giving you five days?
LikeLike
And it keeps happening. Then I miss the due date, and my whole account gets blocked.
LikeLike
Can you contact the lending library directly? Since renewal requests have to go through them anyway, and since they can take a week to go through, you might be able to negotiate for a longer loan period or renew directly through them faster than you could do so through the ILL interface.
LikeLike
Return it after five days. Then request it again the very next day. Repeat until you’re done and/or driven as many people possible crazy.
Or just get it xeroxed?
LikeLike
Wouldn’t that be a form of “copyright violation”?
And that would be an awful amount of dimes for the copy machine.
LikeLike
Yeah, I’m only allowed to photocopy 300 pages per month for free and all of them go to my teaching.
LikeLike
Don’t you have a scanner at home? I have a machine that is a fax, a scanner and a printer at once. Very useful.
Also, there is an app called camscanner for a cell phone. It creates PDFs wonderfully. I need the app because if I simply photograph a page and then try to print it, it will look all grey since the paper of books isn’t truly white. However, the app whitens the page when it creates PDF and then you can print it or read PDFs on your computer with the text being actually black on white and not black on grey.
LikeLike
I’m right at this moment installing one, actually.
LikeLike