Distance Education Services  Tags: uwm distance_education distance_student online_student interlibrary_loan  

Confused about your 11 digit ID number? You may use the Campus ID Finder to have this 11-digit number sent to your email account.

UWM students, faculty & staff with Internet access can connect to most of the Libraries' subscription databases & electronic journals from off-campus (a few titles are licensed for on-campus or in-library use only).

After clicking on a database or resource, you will be prompted to log-in using your ePanther ID and password.

Books may be mailed directly to the UWM Libraries by any standard postal carrier or returned to any UW campus interlibrary loan office that will ship the items back to UWM. Please check with the appropriate staff at the UW library before returning books to their interlibrary loan office. Note: you will be held responsible for late fees, damages or lost items returned to us. The UWM Libraries address is:

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries
Distance Education Liaison/ILL
2311 East Hartford Ave.
Milwaukee, WI 53211

If you are a distance education student (taking all online classes), you can register your ILLiad (the online electronic system you use to request an item through Interlibrary Loan) account to have all your article requests delivered electronically and books mailed to your home.

To set up your account, please contact the Distance Education Librarian, Leigh Dorsey at 1-877-893-8583 (toll free), 414-229-3938 (local) or email deserv@uwm.edu or libill@uwm.edu with your name, UWM ID number, and your major/program.

Please be sure that your home address is up to date in PAWS, as this is the address used to mail materials. If you would like items to be mailed to a different address (i.e. work address), please notify the Distance Education Librarian.

To request items go to ILLiad and login with your campus ID and last name.

ILLiad is your method of requesting items, tracking their status, viewing your request history, renewing books loaned to you from other libraries, and viewing any documents sent to you electronically.

You may request almost anything that you need for your research. Books, journal articles, CD-ROMs, dissertations, DVD/VHS, compact discs, and government documents are all items we may be able to obtain for you. It does not matter if the item is held in the UWM Libraries or is available from another source. Materials requested can be made available to you in a variety of ways. Books, CDs, and other "returnables" will be checked out and sent to your home or office via FedEx. Articles or chapters from books ("non-returnables") will be delivered electronically via your ILLiad account.

Copyright guidelines will be observed when making photocopies of pages from books or journals.

Loan periods for UWM Libraries materials follow the UWM circulation policies. Books borrowed from the UWM Libraries may be renewed indefinitely, as long as you are enrolled and another user does not recall them from you.

To renew a book from the UWM Libraries, go to the online catalog, click on "Personal Record" and enter your 11-digit ID number and last name. Once the items checked out to you are displayed, check the box to the left of each item to mark it for renewal. Then click the "Renew items" button at the bottom of the screen. Finally, note the new due date for each item to assure that they have all been renewed. Please contact the Distance Education Liaison at 1-877-893-8583 or deserv@uwm.edu if you encounter any problems with this procedure. Due dates for books will vary. Undergraduate students receive a four week loan during the fall and spring semesters and a two week loan in the summer. Graduate student due dates coincide with the end of the semesters.

Materials borrowed from other libraries have various loan periods, as each library determines the due date. Typically, loan periods can be two weeks to one month with one renewal. Renewals are at the discretion of the lending library and the length is determined by them. Non-UWM books must be renewed through your ILLiad account. Please note that overdue books cannot be renewed via ILLiad. You will need to contact the interlibrary loan office to request a renewal.

Always note the due date for each item upon receipt. You are responsible for assuring that the UWM Libraries receive all returnables by their due date.

Articles delivered to your ILLiad account are considered "non-returnables" so you do not need to worry about those. They will be automatically purged from your account after a certain number of weeks.

Interlibrary Loan requests are processed Monday through Friday during office hours, usually the same day they are submitted.

Depending on the availability and difficulty of locating the items, articles can take anywhere from one day to several weeks.  Books can take a week up to several months, depending on where the item is coming from and whether another library is willing to loan it.