Ordering items if you are not registered
If you are an occasional user or order small quantities of items, we recommend using one of our credit/debit card based ordering facilities.
- British Library Direct – search a 5 year archive of 20,000 of our most popular journals and order items directly with a credit/debit card.
- British Library Direct order form – if you know which article you need, submit the details to this online order form and pay for it directly with a debit/credit card.
Ordering items if you are a registered customer
If you hold an account with us, you can order items in the following ways:
- ARTWeb/ Explore the British Library- If you are sending an order for one article, complete this simple online form and click on the submit button. Detailed on-screen help is available at each stage.
- ARTEmail - is an email-based ordering system. You can send as many requests as you like in one file, but the list must be formatted correctly (see ‘Creating and Sending your order file’ below).
Creating and sending your order file
We recommend that you prepare your file offline, using a text editor or word processing software, e.g. Notepad.
You must save the file in ASCII text format, to ensure that our system will accept it. If you use Windows®, specify the file type as ‘Text File (*.TXT)’ in the ‘Save File as Type’ box. Once you are happy with the file, copy it to your PC’s clipboard, then paste the file (don’t attach it) into the body of your e-mail message and send it as a plain text e-mail to artemail@art.bl.uk.
ARTEmail will then either confirm that your file has been accepted, or give an Error Code explaining why it has been rejected.
Preferred order of bibliographic details
When sending your requests, please supply all the bibliographic information that you have. Author details are particularly important. If your bibliographic details are quoted in our preferred order, your requests will be automatically sorted and routed to the correct part of the Library. However, your request will not be failed just because the details are put in a different order. The preferred order of the information, for different types of material, is as follows:
Journal Articles
1. Journal title: Canadian Veterinary Journal
2. Year, volume, part, pages required: 2003 VOL 35 PT 2 PP 111-
3. Article title: (first 4 or 5 words) Bovine neonatal encephalomyelitis
and/or first author: Bryan, LA
4. ISSN/British Library shelf mark, if known: 3046.100000
Please prefix the volume number with VOL, followed by a single space; prefix the part number with PT, followed by a single space; and prefix the page number with PP, followed by a single space. Ideally, all this information should be on a single line, as in the example above.
Book Loans
1. Book title: Immunology: a comparative approach
2. Author/editor: Turner, RJ (ed)
3. Publisher/Place of publication: Wiley
4. Year, volume, part, edition: 2003
5. ISBN/British Library shelfmark, if known: 0471944009
Conference Papers
1. Title of conference/publication: Proceedings of 4th International Porifera Congress: Sponges in time and space
2. Date, venue, sponsoring organisation: 19–20 April 2002, Amsterdam
3. Year, volume, part, pages required: 2003 PP 64-
4. Paper title (first 4 or 5 words): Evolutionary genetics of marine sponges
and/or first author Sole-Cara, A M et al
5. ISBN/British Library shelfmark, if known: 03/07435
For more information on formatting your order correctly download our ARTguide.
Ordering items on behalf of other users
Our latest subscription service British Library Direct Plus allows you to search content from British Library, Google Scholar and Pubmed Central from one easy-to-use interface. It also offers a suite of advance management tools that give administrators the power to control how the service is used. You can set up daily, weekly or monthly alerts, save references to a Marked List, export to reference management tools, charged full text purchases to a British Library account or a credit card and set the monthly spending budgets of end users. For more information or a trial, please e-mail marketing@bl.uk.
