Costs and conditions

According to the „Verordnung des Wissenschaftsministeriums über die Erhebung von Bibliotheksgebühren (Bibliotheksgebührenordnung ‒ BiblGebO),“ a fee of € 1,50 will be charged for each interlibrary loan request.
This fee must be paid even when the requested book is actually available in Heidelberg, or when the request could not be fulfilled. If the requester is a student of the university or a user of the library, his/ her library account will be charged. Staff of the university of Heidelberg pay via  (=transaction number). Your institute library has TANs ready for you.  Please enter the TAN in the correspondingly marked input field of the interlibrary loan order form before submitting the order.

The delivery time until the ordered item (books, journals etc.) arrives is usually 1-3 weeks, but it can also take longer. Articles can usually be collected in approx. 3-5 days or accessed via a download link (depending on the delivery method). International interlibrary loans may take up to 4 weeks (depending on the country of origin it might take longer). We have no influence on the delivery time.

If you need an item of literature very urgently, it is possible to use a document delivery service for a higher fee. 

If you have provided your email address, you will be notified at no charge that the requested item is available for pick-up. If you did not provide your email address, you will receive notification through mail and a fee for postage will be charged to your user account. You can also find out whether your item has been delivered by checking your user account online.

The notification in your user account will indicate where the item can be picked up (usually at the self-service-shelves in the main library or at the circulation desk of Neuenheim Branch Library, respectively). There you can also pay any fees that you have not yet paid. If the lending library has loaned an item for on-site use only, the item will be held for you in the reading room. Most of the articles ordered are provided electronically. The articles can be accessed via a download link, which will be sent to you by e-mail from the sender address noreply[at]bsz-bw.de. Please note that the downloads are available for 7 days. After this period, the articles can no longer be accessed. Therefore, please keep your e-mail address in your library account up to date and check your e-mails and, if necessary, your spam folder regularly. As not every library participates in the direct electronic delivery of articles, paper copies are made available in exceptional cases. You may normally keep these photocopies. We have no influence on whether the articles are sent to us in electronic form or as a copy.

Terms of use for interlibrary loan material (e.g. loan period, renewals, item is only to be used in the Reading Room, no photocopying allowed, etc.) are determined by the lending libraries. We have no influence on and are bound by these conditions of the libraries that lend us their property. 

Conditions of use may include, for example:

• Information on the loan period (e.g. shortened loan period, no extension of loan period allowed)
• Prohibition of copying a work (in the case of older, valuable or already damaged works)
• Use of a medium only within the library (on-site use) in the reading room or manuscript reading room (e.g. for older, valuable works, reference holdings, international interlibrary loan orders)

If a loan period extension is not excluded from the outset, you can renew the items once yourself via your library account. But please note that they still may be recalled if they have been requested by another reader or if the lending library has sent a reminder.