When you use the Lake Forest Library Catalog at www.lakeforestlibrary.org/catalog, under “Search Options,” limiting your search by “Lake Forest Materials” restricts your results to items in our collections housed in the building. It’s like dipping your toe into the shallows of all the library items available to you.

Limiting by “All Member Libraries” widens your search to our CCS library consortium, which includes 30+ northeast Illinois libraries who share items with each other. It’s like putting your head underwater and discovering there’s so much more to see.

This year, CCS joined the Find More Illinois (FMI) interlibrary loan platform, so if you don’t find what you want in the Lake Forest or CCS collections, you can now search and request items from the FMI Catalog. To dive into the depths of items available from the currently 50+ additional public, academic, and special libraries across Illinois (including Skokie, Schaumburg, Kankakee, Old Town School of Folk Music, and the University of Illinois at Chicago), go to www.lakeforestlibrary.org/fmi.

In addition to being a more efficient use of your tax dollars, using Find More Illinois means that you are more likely to find out-of-print books and items on specialty/niche topics, among other perks.

Whether you’re searching the local, CCS, or FMI collections, your Librarians are always happy to help, or to do the searching and requesting for you. Plus, we can search even deeper, possibly requesting interlibrary loans for you from a library elsewhere in the U.S.

We recommend that if you don’t find an item after searching the Lake Forest Library Catalog, call us at 847-810-4610 or complete the request webform at www.lakeforestlibrary.org/find.