Borrowing and reservations

Borrowing

Members can borrow eight items for four weeks. Loans can be renewed five times, provided no one else has reserved the item.

Reservations

You can place a hold on a book someone else has on loan, which will prevent them from renewing it. You can also reserve a book on the library shelves and select which of our libraries you want to collect these books from. When they're ready for collection, we’ll email you. You can choose to have them posted to you for free. Look up books on Library Search, click the book title, and use the place hold option on the right-hand side to reserve items.

Renewals

Sign in on Library Search to renew your books using your membership number. Select 'My Account' under your name to view and renew loans. After five renewals books need to come back to the library before they can be issued again.

Postal Loans

If you would like books posted to you free of charge, please fill in the postal loan request form.

You can search for books using our Library Search. Put in your title or topic and click the green magnifying glass to search. To find print books only, use the filters on the left-hand side to refine your search results to ‘Physical Books in Library Catalogue’.

Postal returns

Books can be returned for free using CollectPlus. Visit Returns-Sorted to request a label and receive instructions. It doesn’t matter which library you originally borrowed your books from, return for free to the London library and we’ll make sure they get back to the right shelves. 

Interlibrary loans / Article Requests

You can request articles that are not available from the Library and Museum's collection. Where possible we will obtain them from another library on your behalf. This costs £5. Please fill in the article request form and wait for confirmation.

You can also suggest books for us to purchase for our collection using our Feedback and Book Suggestion Form