Services for the General Public

If you are able to visit the campus, see Visitor and Guest Services.

Databases

The library does not provide database access for the general public. Contracts we have with database vendors limit remote access to current faculty, students and staff.

Print resources

If you cannot visit the campus, then you may obtain materials cited in the library catalog either by borrowing through the Interlibrary Loan system or by purchasing through a commercial vendor. Details follow.

Borrowing

Dallas Theological Seminary maintains library collections for the use of current faculty, students, and staff. The seminary library does not mail materials directly to graduates or to the general public. However, the seminary does participate in interlibrary loan, and your local (public or academic) library can borrow items from us. We do charge a small fee when we ship materials to public libraries.

Interlibrary loan is a service whereby one library will loan items or provide copies to another library for the use of a requesting client. Thus you can go to the interlibrary loan department of your local (public or academic) library and request almost any item your library does not own. Your library will then borrow the item for you. When you request something via interlibrary loan, you do not need to know what library owns the item. Your local library is responsible for identifying potential suppliers (and there are some databases that make this very easy to do). So your library may borrow from DTS or another library to meet your needs. You are responsible for providing your library with an accurate bibliographic citation such as:

  • author, book title, edition, publisher and date; or
  • author, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages, and date.

If you find a thesis or dissertation in Turpin Library that you would like to borrow, you may borrow a copy through interlibrary loan. However, you may purchase most DTS doctoral dissertations from ProQuest (see below), and any DTS masters thesis 1985 to date from TREN (see below).

Purchasing

Of course the library does not sell its materials, but you may be able to purchase a book, dissertation, tape etc. from one the following sources.