Comment by reaperducer
2 days ago
and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy. If you can request a book and have it arrive in a few days
I've done ILL in three major cities. The shortest time it took to get the books requested was 14 days. Some have taken over 60.
There’s different levels of interlibrary loan - around here all the little local libraries can loan from each other in a matter of days (they ship to a central location each day). But they can also pull from a much wider distribution via media mail if needed.
You can request a book from another library that's already checked out in some cases, which means you have to wait for it to be returned first. In my experience, a week is usually the norm.
That seems like a very reasonable timeframe for a physical book. Certainly used to take longer than that to special-order something.
In 1897 the US Library of Congress moved off-site from the Capitol building to an adjacent property. A key concern of its patronage (Congress itself) was how long it would take to retrieve books from this remote location.
The annual Librarian's letter details the results: an unannounced test of five arbitrarily-selected works was made via pneumatic tube (later supplemented with a telephone), and the requested works arrived within 10m5s, 8m11s, 10m, and with the longest delay, 12 minutes from receipt of the request.
See p. 7 of the annual Librarian's Report: <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015036735044&vi...>.
One would hope that 2026 technolgies would be capable of results within at least the same order of magnitude, even at a greater physical separation.
One of my tremendous disappointments of today's Internet is the haste with which it delivers drek, but the reluctance with which it provides useful information, often for utterly outdated concerns with copyright. I'll note that HathiTrust itself, here the source of what was originally a public-domain US government publication, well outside any possible extant of copyright, still only permits one-page-at-a-time downloading of the original document.