The number of books available to Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff will increase in the fall when the University of Chicago joins Borrow Direct, a system that allows for the sharing of library materials between institutions that are members of Borrow Direct.
Chicago joins Dartmouth, the seven other Ivy League institutions, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Borrow Direct partnership. With the addition of Chicago, the circulating collections of the Borrow Direct libraries include more than 50 million volumes.
More than 1.5 million items have been shared across the partnership since Borrow Direct was initiated in 1999. Dartmouth has been a member of Borrow Direct since 2002.
The addition of Chicago as a new partner is significant, says Jeffrey Horrell, Dean of Libraries at Dartmouth and co-convener of the partnership’s directors group.
“The Borrow Direct partnership is delighted to welcome the University of Chicago as a full participant in the program,” Horrell says. “The depth of Chicago’s collections will greatly enhance the overall resources available in Borrow Direct and will support our collective users in their discovery and scholarship.”
“The Borrow Direct partnership will provide rapid and increased access to rich collections held by our peer institutions, thus helping to connect our students and scholars with the composite wealth of these collections,” says Judith Nadler, library director and university librarian at Chicago. “At the same time, the project will provide a venue to explore future models for shared collection building that include both print and digital forms.”
Borrow Direct enables users to do a single search of the combined library catalogs and request prompt delivery of circulating items. At Dartmouth, the turnaround time from request to receipt of materials is about four days. Since July 1, 2012, more than 25,000 books have been lent by Dartmouth and the College has borrowed 12,000 items through Borrow Direct.
Dartmouth is consistently a top lender in the number of items lent and it has the highest fill rate among Borrow Direct partners, says Horrell. Since 2002, Dartmouth has borrowed more than 104,000 books and lent almost a quarter of a million items.
