Document Delivery Services in the United States

Document delivery services sell you copies of articles, sections of books and other materials for a fee.

Traditionally, document delivery services work out of a particular library. Two excellent traditional services are NYPL Premium Services (212-592-7200), which works out of the New York Public Library, and British Library Direct, which works out of the British Library.

A service called Documents Delivered works out of about 20 libraries, including the Library of Congress, the British Library, the New York Public Library, the Linda Hall library and NTIS. They could be your one-stop-shop.

You can also order copies of articles from purely online document delivery services, which blur the line between the traditional services and electronic databases. Ingenta is a good general online document delivery service. OCLC’s Electronic Collections Online specializes in the document delivery of articles from academic journals.

Legal Materials: Most law school and bar association libraries have document delivery services. Some good services include:

• Boalt Express (from the U. Cal. Berkley Library), 510-642-0950
• Columbia University Law School, 212-854-7851 for subscribers, others call 800-332-4529;
• Information Express (from Stanford U.), 415-812-3588
• Jenkins Memorial Library, 215-574-7909
• The New York County Lawyers’ Association library, 212-267-6646, x205 or x206
• The New York University Law Library, 212-998-6302
• The Social Law Library, 888-523-0114
• The University of Connecticut law library 230-241-7685

To find services at libraries not listed here, just call the library. Whoever answers the main number can probably point you in the right direction.

Other specialties: There are document delivery services specializing in materials from specific states and specific subjects. We have listed some in the entries for the individual states (e.g., “California”) and subjects (e.g., “Medical Materials” or “Engineering“).

Note: For specific information about getting news articles, search “News” as a Subject.

See Also

Document Retrieval Services
Medical Materials
Newspapers
Periodicals
Science
Engineering