Calvin Community

InterLibrary Loan (ILL) service is free of charge to members of the Calvin community (staff, faculty and students of the college and seminary). Students who are enrolled in courses abroad and seminary students who are on internships or summer assignments out of the area have limited ILL service. See our Off Campus - Calvin members page for more details about library service to this group.

Guests and Alumni

See our policies for Guests and Alumni.

Guests must use their local public libraries or the services offered by the educational institutions where they are enrolled. The purchase of a guest user card at Hekman does not include Interlibrary Loan service.

Alumni may request up to five items per academic year and an additional five during the summer months. All materials, excluding photocopied articles, must be used in the library. If a Calvin alum is enrolled at another institution, he or she must use that institution's ILL service.

Graduates of the seminary's EPMC (Ecclesiastical Program for Ministerial Candidacy) are considered alumni of the seminary if they have been enrolled for one quarter or more.

All Users - Excessive Cost Policy

Excessive cost is determined by copyright fees, not by the number of requests submitted. Libraries must adhere to the "Five-Five Rule," which states that when a library requests more than five articles from a single journal title published in the last five years, the library must pay copyright fees. These fees can sometimes be exhorbitantly expensive, depending on the subject matter of the journal.

For example, the cost for 20 articles from the past five years for a student majoring in physics or engineering could cost $30-$40 per article! Copyright fees, plus the fact that journal subscription rates are higher in the sciences, are responsible for the added cost. 

The following guidelines are therefore effective for all members of the Calvin community:

• Semester total for a borrower cannot exceed $500.
• If a semester total exceeds $500, the borrower will be notified that his or her request cannot be processed.
• If a list of requests in one group exceed the semester total, the borrower will be asked to prioritize the requests.

All Users - Equity Policy

To ensure that all patrons are served in a timely manner, large requests from single users will be spread over several days. The ILL department is staffed by one fulltime person and a few parttime student workers. Patrons need to be aware that there are limitations to how quickly the staff can process requests. If one person's requests dominate a single day's workload, other reqeusts submitted the same day may be delayed.