InterLibrary Loan (ILL)

How much does it cost?

• This is a free service for all USM affiliated students, staff, faculty, alumni or retirees. Members of the public can purchase membership. Please contact us for more information.

What if I attend another UMaine School?

• Please see your home library’s website for this service.

What resources can I access?

• Generally, we can find anything that we can reasonably expect to find in a library. Books, journals and newspaper articles, music scores, plays, DVDs, etc.

What resources are not available?

• While we are always happy to try, we often cannot request materials that require in-person research such as archival, legal and unpublished historical documents.

• Materials that are part of a service, such as streaming videos, datasets or market reports are often unavailable as well.

How quickly will my requests arrive?

• PDF items arrive within a day on average. Hard copy materials typically take 7-10 business days.

How will I be notified?

• We will send updates and notices to the email address you provide.

• At first, you may want to check your spam folder.

How do I get my materials?

• Whenever possible, we upload PDFs to your account. If it is a hard copy item, you can pick it up at any of the three USM campus libraries.

Can you get the required reading for my classes?

• Possibly. Most libraries do not buy the newest and latest editions of textbooks.

• If they do, they generally reserve items for their own students. However, we can find most monographs titles.
• Please see the Course Reserves page for more information (link at the end of FAQ's). We might already have what you need.

Are there limits to what I can request?

• Yes, copyright rules do apply. We are not able to have entire works duplicated for you.

• We can order up to three chapters from a book or two articles from the same journal issue.

I don’t have my USM card!

• Please contact the card office. (link at the end of Troubleshooting)

I forgot my login information...

• Please contact us and we can look up your information.

I didn’t get a password reset email.

• Please check your spam folder and verify that you have the right username. If that does not work, please contact us and we can help you from there.

But, our databases say we own it?

• The databases can be confusing and may have technical issues. Please submit a request and we will get the item the fastest way we can.