Visiting Patrons

Visiting Patrons are faculty, staff, and students at MERLIN/MOBIUS institutions. UM-St. Louis faculty, staff, students can check out materials directly from any library participating in the MERLIN/MOBIUS consortium. These are the MOBIUS patron initiated circulation policies:

1. Types of materials available for loan -- monographs only are available through MOBIUS patron initiated borrowing.

2. Loan length -- 21 days for all patron types.

3. Renewals -- two renewals of 21 days are allowed. Items with additional holds may not renew.

4. Recalls -- Materials may only be recalled by the owning library, and may be recalled from any patron type. Minimum Use: 20 days

5. Reserve -- Materials borrowed through MOBIUS may not be placed on reserve at the borrowing institution.

6. ILL -- Patrons should be strongly encouraged to use MOBIUS patron initiated borrowing instead of traditional ILL.

7. Patron records -- Complete patron records are available only in the home cluster of the patron. Only authorized staff at the patron's home library may change, update or enter patron records for their borrowers. Only staff at the home library may override blocks for their patrons.

8. MOBIUS loan rules -- MOBIUS loan rules should not be overridden to permit longer loans than originally allowed, either by extending loan periods or checking in and checking out again.

9. Each institution determines who in its patron database will receive MOBIUS faculty, staff or student status. Each institution accepts responsibility for material borrowed by any person it has authorized to borrow through the MOBIUS system.

10. Charges -- A lost book replacement charge of $120 will be billed to patrons who do not return MOBIUS items 45 days after the due date. This includes a $100 lost book fee and $20 non refundable billing fee. The patron's home library may keep the monies collected for the billing fee only when books are returned; the owning library will get all monies collected for replacement costs of lost books.

11. An institutional photo I. D. or an institutional I. D., plus a government issued photo I. D. (e.g., driver's license, state I. D., passport, etc.) will be required to check out materials as a Visiting Patron.

© 2004 by the Curators of the University of Missouri, a public corporation Access Services Department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Phone: (314) 516-5057. Email: AcSDinfo@umsl.edu. This page was last updated on February 7, 2008 .