It is becoming increasingly difficult to know in advance whether it will be possible to borrow a particular thesis or dissertation from a particular university through interlibrary loan. Most universities will lend a paper copy of a masters thesis or Ph.D. dissertation if a paper copy is available. However, some universities will not lend paper copies at all. Even those universities that will lend paper copies may not have paper copies after a particular date, and only an electronic copy may exist. Whether you will be able to access that electronic copy varies according to the policies of the individual university. Some electronic copies may be available through the Web, others may not.

The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, produces the world’s premier database of journal and non-journal education literature. The ERIC online system provides the public with a centralized ERIC Web site for searching the ERIC bibliographic database of more than 1.2 million citations going back to 1966. More than 107,000 full-text non-journal documents issued 1993-present are freely available in the ERIC database.

You can obtain NTIS (National Technical Information Service) reports through ILLiad. See the NTIS Web page for more information about the NTIS report collections and NTIS services. You may wish to contact NTIS with your questions about pricing and availability of reports before submitting your request through ILLiad. Phone numbers for the NTIS orders desk are on the NTIS Ordering Information page.

All United States patents issued since 1790 are available as full page images directly from the U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Web Patent Database. Patents issued since 1976 are also available as full-text HTML pages.

The European Patent Office provides access to a variety of Patent Information Products and Search Engines. In particular, esp@cenet is a gateway to patent indexes, with support for several languages when accessed through the national offices of member states. English, German, and French interfaces are available on the European Patent Office's Patent Databases page. Included in the databases are patents from the European Patent Office, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and from world-wide sources including the United States and Japan.

SAE Technical Papers published prior to 2003 are available in Newman Library in a variety of formats including paper, microform, or CD-ROM. They can be found in Addison. Additional information is available on an SAE Refsheet.

SAE Technical papers published in 2003 through the present can be special ordered for you through ILLiad. There is no charge to you for these special order papers.

Industry standards are not usually available on loan from other libraries. Instead, they must be purchased from the organization that issues the standard, or from a commercial document supplier that specializes in acquiring standards.

You can find this information about the standard you need by searching the standards database maintained by IHS/Global, the world's leading distributor of standards and other technical documents. See also our guide to finding standards.