It’s delinking time at the GC Library! No, no one’s breaking up, and the hyperlinks on the website will still all work (we hope). Delinking means separating information about requested titles from information about who requested them. At the GC, we delink interlibrary loan requests from library user names twice a year, winter and summer.

We are about to perform our semi-annual purge of ILL request information. This means that your ILL request history will disappear after July 1, 2018.

So, if you’re relying on your request history in your ILL account to build a bibliography for that big paper, or thesis, or dissertation, DON’T. That request history can serve as a useful record, but we also want to keep information about library requests private. The best way for us to do that is to just delete the information about who requested what soon after a request is complete.

We first “delinked” library user names from ILL requests, keeping only the last three years of requests, in 2015. In 2016 and ’17, we went through the process again. Now we have moved to delinking twice a year, in order to keep ILL request information as private as possible. Therefore your account only includes your ILL requests from at most the last six months.

How to Save Your List of ILL Requests

If you want to keep a personal record of your ILL transactions before they are delinked, just copy your requests by using the instructions below by July 1, 2018.

1. Log in to your GC ILL account.
2. Find a list of everything you requested through ILL since the last delinking by clicking on View > Request History on the left. That 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 select 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!

If you need a convenient way to keep track of all your ILL requests and other citations, we highly recommend using a citation manager like Zotero. We give frequent workshops on using Zotero, so keep an eye on this blog for upcoming events.

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