Interlibrary loan is a service provided by public and academic libraries
usually at no cost to the patron. All you really need is a book title and
author, but edition and publisher information is helpful.
Anyway, even if you find the book in a particular library's catalog yourself,
chances are it will come to you from a completely different source.
Librarians check a hierarcy of libraries that step from their local to
regional to state to regional until the book is located, and the academic /
university libraries have a different hierarcy in place from the public
libraries. At some point these cross over though, because I often get books
from University libraries through my public library ILL requests.
Having said all that, most states now have a combined statewide library
catalog in place. In Georgia, it's referred to as GIL and you can access the
catalog for searching the entire state of university libraries at
http://gil.uga.edu/
Public libraries now have regional combined catalogs in place and they may be
accessed at
http://www.peachnet.edu/galileo/libraries.html
This info. is excerpted from How To Do Research On The Internet - a set of 12
self paced lessons I developed in conjunction with Dr. Robert Fernekes, PhD.
Reference Librarian at Georgia Southern. It is available for $24.95 on CD.
John Rigdon