Saving Your Interlibrary Loan Requests: ILL and Library User Privacy

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Twice a year, in January and in the summer, we “delink” completed interlibrary loan requests from library usernames. This means that your ILL account will only show your ILL requests from the last 6 months, if they are finished.

While your ILL account can sometimes serve as a useful record, we also want to keep information about library requests private. As a result, every six months, we detach finished requests from usernames so that our databases no longer have information about who requested them.

(If you need a good way to keep track of all your ILL requests and other citations, try a citation manager like Zotero. The GC Library offers regular hands-on Zotero workshops. If no workshops are offered at a time that works for you, you can always contact your subject librarian for one-on-one help.)

In the meantime, if there is any ILL history you want to keep, download it before January 1, 2019.  Below are step-by-step instructions.  If you have any questions or need any help, just email us at ill@gc.cuny.edu.

How to Keep Your ILL Requests/History

1. Log in 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!

About the Author

Resource Sharing Librarian, Graduate Center Library.