Loans to Libraries Outside the U.S.

The Library of Congress serves as a primary source for material published in the United States and secondarily for items published outside the US and not available from the country of origin. LC's policies generally follow the procedures set out in the IFLA Principles and Guidelines for Interlending.

For requests submitted from outside the U.S. via OCLC, you must include the correct charge in the max cost field. For loans, you should put $24 IFM; for photocopies, you should put $16 IFM. Requests submitted without the correct charges will not be processed.

Although the CALM Division mainly accepts requests from libraries outside the United States that are participating members of either the OCLC or RLIN bibliographic network, the Division also accepts requests by surface mail (not fax) if the request includes the correct number of IFLA vouchers. Book loans require 3 vouchers (valued at US $24) and article photocopies require 2 vouchers (valued at US $16). For more information about vouchers, please view the web page for the IFLA Voucher Scheme.

The Library of Congress OCLC symbol for interlibrary loans is LCL or DLC; the RLIN/ILL Manager symbol is DCLW. If you are an OCLC or RLIN participating library outside the US, please refer to your network contact for further instructions.

Surface mail requests should be sent with the appropriate number of vouchers to:

Library of Congress
CALM Division
101 Independence Avenue S.E.
Washington, DC 20540-4670
USA

For more detail on loan policies, see: Circulation Policies .