Borrowing requests for dissertations are a common occurrence in the world of interlibrary loan. Dissertations are attractive to student researchers because they often deal with narrowly-defined topics, and they turn up easily in the search results of many popular academic databases. However, since dissertations can exist in several formats, are usually only held by the institution for which they were created, and may or may not be freely available online, it can be difficult and time consuming to make certain all borrowing possibilities have been covered
