Shoutout to the interlibrary loan lady who saved my project

I was working on a paper about 1970s community gardens in Detroit and hit a wall. The main library didn't have the city planning records I needed, and I was already 3 weeks behind. My librarian, Mrs. Patel at the downtown branch, suggested I try interlibrary loan. She found a microfilm copy of the Detroit Free Press gardening columns from 1972 at a university in Ohio. It arrived in 4 days and completely changed my thesis. Has anyone else had a last minute save from ILL?

2 comments

2 Comments

reed.ray9d agoMost Upvoted

Oh man, I used to think interlibrary loan was some slow, dusty process that took forever. Boy was I wrong. I needed this obscure book on urban chicken keeping (don't ask, it was for a newsletter) and my local library didn't have it. The librarian found a copy at some small college in Oregon and it got here in like 5 days. Totally saved my project and changed my mind about the whole system (I used to just give up if the library didn't have something). Now I always ask first before I hit the panic button.

valgibson8d ago

That Ohio connection is wild, you know my Mrs. Patel actually got me a microfilm reel from a tiny historical society in Minnesota once, not even a university. It was some really niche zoning board meeting notes from 1971 that had hand-drawn maps of the garden plots. Makes me wonder, did your librarian ever tell you what the actual turnaround time is on those requests? Because I notice sometimes it takes 4 days and other times it takes 3 weeks and I can never figure out the difference.