Saving Your ILL Requests and Keeping Them Private: July 2020 Delinking

If you want to keep your past Inter-Library Loan (ILL) request history for future reference, please be sure to download it by early July 2020.

At the Graduate Center Library, we do a periodic delinking of finished ILL requests so that we can keep information about library requests private. This means we detach records of requests from the usernames of the requesters in our database. We’ll have statistics, but we (and you) will no longer have information about who requested what material in the ILL system.

After we delink in July, you will have access to only to approximately the last six months of finished requests in your ILL account history.

Or, if you would like to save your older requests, just follow the instructions below before your access to the records is gone for good.

While your Inter-Library Loan request history is one way of accumulating bibliographical information, a better way to keep track of all your ILL requests and other citations is 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.

Below are step-by-step instructions to save your records.  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

Beth Posner is the Head of Library Resource Sharing at The CUNY Graduate Center Library.