As davidgoldfarb implies, ILL is broader than the local library network. When I was a small and my parents were reading the Swallows and Amazons series aloud to us -- back before more than the first two were reprinted -- the books would come to us from quite a variety of far-off random places like Wisconsin or Missouri. The idea is that your library finds some other library system somewhere in the country that owns the book, and requests it from them and if they're willing to loan it out, it eventually makes its way to you.
The effect of this, though, is that the checkout rules tend to be a bit more stringent.
(FWIW, Wikipedia's ILL article points to WorldCat as one of the ways libraries identify other libraries that have a particular book, when they're making ILL requests.)
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Date: 2012-01-13 07:16 am (UTC)The effect of this, though, is that the checkout rules tend to be a bit more stringent.
(FWIW, Wikipedia's ILL article points to WorldCat as one of the ways libraries identify other libraries that have a particular book, when they're making ILL requests.)