Quick Summary
In this four-part series, guest author, David Zopfi-Jordan shares what he learned in an online course through the American Library Association entitled: “Xtreme Bibliographic Searching for Interlibrary Loan & Reference.”
I recently took a four-week online learning class offered by the American Library Association (ALA) entitled “Xtreme Bibliographic Searching for Interlibrary Loan & Reference.” In the first week of class, the primary websites we discussed were MARC (standards for description of items cataloged by libraries) and WorldCat (a global library catalog). These websites allow us to look at bibliographic information to find the ISBN or ISSN which is useful for locating holding libraries before you place an interlibrary loan (ILL) request.
The instructors pointed out some other fields to check for ILL items.
- Field 300 for physical description (size, shape, the number of pages).
- Field 362 is the date of the publication.
- Field 490 for series titles.
- Field 502 is for thesis or dissertations. This is good to know if you want to see if the item is available from an online source such as ProQuest Dissertations or from the university that granted the degree.
- Field 520 for summary notes which might provide an abstract or summary.
- Field 546 for the language.
- Field 700 is for added authors, illustrators, editors.
- Field 776 is for added formats.
- Fields 780 or 785 are for previous and successive title changes. This is important because when looking for a journal or newspaper you need to make sure you have the correct title that matches the date it was printed/published. If you don't, the previous and successive titles used will help to ensure you request the correct item.
- Field 856 is for electronic location and access.
Below are some of the other links mentioned in the class that might help ILL staff search and find items for their patrons:
- Chronicling America - historic newspapers, digitized.
- DOAJ - the Directory of Open Access Journals.
- DPLA - the Digital Public Library of America.
- DART - for European theses.
- Google Scholar - a broad search for academic literature.
- Haithi Trust - a collection of digital titles from libraries around the world.
- Internet Archive - free books, movies, software, and more.
- LibGuides - information to print and electronic sources on a topic.
- PubMed - citations to biomedical literature that may include full-text content.
- ShareILL - an interlibrary loan information center.
