While the Resource Sharing Team strives to fill all interlibrary loan (ILL) requests, existing copyright laws and license restrictions from publishers may delay and/or interfere with the fulfillment of digital requests, like articles.

CONTU guidelines, in compliance with Section 108 of the Copyright Act, limit a library's access to articles published within the last five years. During every calendar year (January - December), the library's Resource Sharing Team can only request up to five articles published within the last five years from the same periodical/journal title. In addition, each article must be from a different issue.

Requests that exceed this "rule of five" may be delayed and in some cases cancelled, depending on copyright price and/or external access. To comply with this rule, the library either needs to purchase the item from an external vendor or pay a permission request fee to the journal's publisher. Each request for a journal article that has exceeded copyright compliance will be individually assessed. 

Duplicate requests for previously ordered and received items will be cancelled if the library is unable to re-acquire them via a copyright-compliant method. As part of CONTU guidelines, the library maintains records of all ILL requests and their fulfillment within the last three calendar years to verify compliance.

We reserve the right to cancel any request that violates federal copyright law.