ILL information

Privacy statement

Data we require

If you wish to request materials through ILLiad, then we ask you to provide the minimum personal information that makes it possible for us to deliver those materials to you.

Personal information requested by ILLiad is the minimum information that enables us to identify you as a student, faculty member, or staff member at Virginia Tech. For this purpose we need to know your name, Virginia Tech ID number, and department. To deliver items to you, we also need to know the library location where you prefer to pick up materials, along with your phone number or e-mail address so we may contact you about your request. If you want materials mailed to your address, then we must also know that address. To protect your personal data and information about your requests, you set a password that enables you to log on to ILLiad and access all your personal information and information about your requests. Your password is known only to you. It is encrypted and stored by ILLiad and cannot be read by anyone, including library staff.

We verify your name, Tech ID number, department, and university status (student, faculty, or staff) by looking at information about you that is stored in the Addison patron database and in the Virginia Tech People Search database. In addition, we may contact your department to verify that you are a member of that department.

How we use ILLiad data

Information about you and your requests is stored in ILLiad's database on a computer hosted by Atlas Systems, Inc. in Virginia Beach, VA. Employees of the Interlibrary Loan Department and technical staff at Atlas Systems are the only individuals who can access this information.

Your name, departmental affiliation and bibliographic details about your request are included in the ILL work form sent to other libraries as part of the borrowing process. A copy of the OCLC work form is usually returned to us with loaned materials, and your personal information enables us to clearly identify incoming materials.

Information about each of your requests, both filled and cancelled, will be retained online in ILLiad for at least three years, and most likely longer. This enables us to demonstrate our compliance with United States copyright law and with generally accepted copyright compliance guidelines used by the library profession. See our Copyright page for more details about copyright compliance.

At times we may prepare internal library management reports that will associate ILLiad requests with your name.

While assisting the library's collection development personnel and instructional staff to improve the library collections or the library training programs, information about the books and articles you borrowed may be shared with library faculty and staff outside the Interlibrary Loan Department. Typical reports deal with borrowing patterns for heavily used journals and data that may indicate problems with the effective use of Addison to find materials housed in the Blacksburg libraries.

Web log data

Our department's Web server creates a log of standard data about visitors to our site. Generally this data cannot be associated with an individual. For each web page requested, a Web log usually includes the date and time of the request, the IP address of the requesting computer, the URL of the referring page (if any), the computer platform, and the Web browser. We use this data to analyze how our Web pages are used and to determine how our service may be improved.