How do I register for British Library On Demand and access articles sent electronically?
So you can access articles sent to you by the British Library in this way, you will need to register with their On Demand service.
The link to the British Library Website contains important information about your order and the restrictions that come with it. Please be mindful of these restrictions.
From the ‘collecting your article’ section, you can click on ‘British Library On Demand Account’ to get to the registration page:
Complete all the required fields and please use your university e-mail address as that is the address the Library System will be using to send your request to the British Library.
Do not use your university username and password for this account.
Create a completely separate username and password, and do not use the @ symbol in your password.
Whenever an article is sent to you by the British Library On Demand Service this is what you will have to use to open the document.
You will receive an e-mail from the British Library asking you to confirm and activate your account.
When the article is sent to you
When received, the e-mail from the BL will look like this:
If you have just
If you have registered for a BL account, there can be a few minutes delay for your registration to take hold. If you have received a document from the BL soon after registering, your very first attempt to access may not work. Try again after a while when you should be able to access.
We have found that copying the link into a Firefox browser is the easiest way to access documents, as using browsers such as Chrome would require you to disable their built-in PDF viewer.
Once you have accessed the link sent to you, you will see a page with a your username on, and a button to download the document:
Once you have downloaded the document, it will be accessible only to you, and it should show your username on this page.
Click 'download your document'
You should then see a normal open/download box:
Select 'Open with' and make sure Adobe Acrobat is what you are using to open the document.
Click 'OK'
You will then be asked for your British Library On Demand username and password:
Enter your On Demand username and password, and click ok.
Your document should then open:
We advise you to print the document once you have opened it. You have permission to print this once.
If you have any difficulty with your British Library article you can raise the problem with the British Library directly, or forward the e-mail you received to the Inter-Library Loans team explaining what the difficulty is and we will contact the British Library for you.