Referrals

Beyond the Madison Campus

If you cannot verify that an item is owned at the UW Madison*, or it is not available, you have a several options as a WiLS ILL Deposit account library depending on whether you are an OCLC or non-OCLC library:

  1. OCLC Libraries: you can use the MINITEX/WILS arrangement: If the item (loan or copy) is owned in Minnesota, North or South Dakota, you can include MINITEX (MII) in the OCLC lender string Academic libraries send to and receive requests from MINITEX via OCLC and pay by IFM using the current WILS referral credit rate ($6 in 2007, see Fees). Public libraries send and receive via OCLC on a reciprocal basis. We recommend that you select WiLS as the first choice in your lender string if it is owned at UW Madison, followed by MII.

    You can get all the MINITEX accessible locations at: www.minitex.umn.edu/docdel/locations
    (Note that the number of times that you include MII in the lender string determines how far into the network they will go to fill your request).
    A major advantage of this relationship is that you can use the statewide delivery network to send and receive materials.

  2. NON-OCLC Libraries:We will refer the requests for you if you wish. For loans, we will only go to Wisconsin and MINITEX locations. For copies, we will refer anywhere in the world, but out-of-country items must be accessible via OCLC. The current cost is listed in fees. Include WiLS in three locations in the lender string. If you don't want any referrals by us, put the phrase Campus Only in the borrowing notes.
* Most materials owned at UW Madison are included in OCLC Worldcat. There are still some older items that have not been cataloged. If an item was published before 1976, it may still be useful to send the request to WiLS first or to contact the WiLS reference service.

Shipping

Referrals will be sent to you via the same method you receive items from WiLS, i.e., red box, mail, UPS, Ariel, or Edoc. Libraries in Wisconsin will ship the item directly to your library. Materials received from out of state libraries (including Minitex) are shipped to WiLS which will then send them to you via your preferred method.

Cost

The cost of a referral is the ILL basic request fee plus the refererral fee ($6 plus $10.24 in 2007/08, see Fees) for each request regardless of how many times we refer it. You are charged that fee whether we are able to fill it or not, and we will pay charges up to $50. We will try as many libraries as possible until the deadline date or we run out of potential lenders.

Process

When a request is referred, your original OCLC request is put in "Will Supply" status with the borrowing notes indicating when it was referred and to whom. In most cases the request is filled and you update OCLC to "received." However, if a referral request cannot be filled, because of the artificial updating to "Will Supply" status, we update the unfilled OCLC request to "Recalled" with the reasons we could not fill it in the borrowing notes (see reply codes). At this point you can delete the request. "

Problems?

If you have any questions regarding the Referral Service, please contact Bob Shaw (reshaw at wils.wisc.edu)at 608.263.4981.

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