Required Data

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 MIT. For this purpose we need to know your name, MIT status, 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 and e-mail address so we may contact you about your request.

To protect your personal data and information about your requests, you set a password that enables you to logon to ILLiad and access all your personal information and information about your requests. Your password is known only to you. It is stored in an encrypted fine in the ILLiad database, which cannot be read by anyone.

We verify your name, MIT status, and department, by looking at information about you that is stored in the MIT directory and the patron database in the MIT Libraries Barton Catalog.

How we use ILLiad data

Information about you and your requests is stored in the ILLiad database, which is hosted on a computer at Atlas Systems, Inc., in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Library staff in Document Services are the only individuals who can access this information at MIT. The staff of Atlas Systems perform hosted ILLiad system maintenance and support, including scheduled database backup, restoration of system data in the case of a failure, and other automated tasks. On rare occations, Atlas Systems staff may require access to individual request records to determine the nature of reported problems and resolve the issue.

Your last name and bibliographic details about your request are included in the interlibrary loan request form sent to other libraries as part of the borrowing process. A copy of request form is usually returned to us with loaned materials, and your last name allows library staff to clearly identify and transmit received materials.

Information about each of your requests, both filled and cancelled, will be displayed online through the Request History in the ILLiad web pages for at least one year, and up to 18 months. Requests completed more than one year ago are purged from your ILLiad account in January and June of each year. Therefore, requests may remain in your request history for up to 18 months.

After 18 months, your personal information will be removed from the requests in the ILLiad database. The requests themselves will remain in the ILLiad database in order to comply with United States copyright law and with generally accepted copyright compliance guidelines used by the library profession.

At times we may prepare internal library management reports that will associate ILLiad requests with your department or MIT status, however, these reports will not include your personal information.

Web statistics

The ILLiad server hosted at Atlas Systems creates a log of standard data about visitors to the ILLiad web pages. 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 for a particular HTML page, the IP address of the requesting computer, the URL of the referring page (if any), the computer platform, and the type of web browser.

This data may be used to determine benchmarks for interlibrary borrowing services, and analyzed in the process of planning service improvements.

See also: MIT Libraries Privacy Policy