Interlibrary Loan: Miscellaneous Materials

IHS/Global is the world's leading distributor of standards and other technical documents, which are searchable via the IHS/Global database.

Standards must be purchased from the organization that issues the standard, or from a commercial document supplier.

Interlibrary Loan can purchase technical standards for currently enrolled/employed Virginia Tech faculty and graduate students, with a limit of $1,000 per requester in a calendar year.

Please provide as much information as possible, including the standard number and the complete title.

Select Standard from the left menu bar to place an ILLiad request.

United States Patents

• 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.

Foreign patents

The European Patent Office provides access to a variety of Patent Information Products and search engines. 

• Espacenet is a gateway to patent indexes.

• English, German, and French interfaces are available on the European Patent Office's Patent Databases page. 

• Included are patents from the European Patent Office, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and from world-wide sources including the United States and Japan.

If the patent you need is a U. S. patent that is not included in the USPTO database, or if it is a foreign patent, Interlibrary Loan will try to obtain the patent for you.

You can obtain information about finding and using patents by consulting one of the subject specialists.

Requesting patents

From your ILLiad select Patent under the Request section on the left menu bar.

If possible, please include as much information as you have, such as:

• Patent Number

• Title of the Patent

• Country of Origin

• Author/Patent Holder

The Virginia Tech Libraries is one of 230 members of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), which supports advanced research and teaching in the humanities, sciences and social sciences by ensuring the survival and availability of the knowledge resources vital to these disciplines. CRL holdings can be for either microfilm/fiche copies or PDF files of the original material.

Collections include:

• newspapers 
  • 6,500 international newspapers, many dating to the 1700's
  • 4,500 U.S. newspapers, many dating to the colonial era, including 2,000 ethnic titles
• journals
  • Foreign journals that are rarely held in U.S. libraries
• documents
  • More than 800,000 foreign dissertations
  • Area Studies – Major microform and paper collections from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, and more.
• archives
• other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching.

CRL provides a generous loan period of three months with unlimited renewals.  However, all material may be recalled after two weeks if requested by another member institution or project participant. The borrower is obligated to return materials immediately upon recall.

Materials can be requested via your ILLiad account.

Requests for media materials (DVDs, compact discs, videos, microfilm, etc.) should be for educational/research purposes.

All media materials are subject to the copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) and must comply with federal copyright law and other applicable state and federal laws in regards to duplication, exhibition, and distribution.

SAE Technical Papers

All SAE Technical Papers and Ground Vehicle Standards (J standards) can be accessing in SAE Mobilus . You will still need to request aerospace standards and SAE journal articles through ILLiad.

NTIS

The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) provides an expansive collection of over 3 million government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related documents.

NTIS documents can be searched via the library's NTIS database or the NTIS webpage.