University of Chicago Library enters borrowing agreement with Ivy League schools

University of Chicago faculty, students and staff will soon be able to borrow circulating materials from the libraries of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Yale, and the Center for Research Libraries as the University of Chicago Library joins the Borrow Direct partnership. 

The circulating collections of the Borrow Direct libraries include more than 50 million volumes, and more than 1.5 million items have been shared across the Borrow Direct partnership since it was initiated in 1999. When implemented at UChicago in the fall, Borrow Direct will enable users to do a single search of the combined catalogs and to request prompt delivery of circulating items. Materials requested by UChicago borrowers will typically be delivered to their selected campus library within four calendar days.   

“The Borrow Direct partnership is delighted to welcome the University of Chicago as a full participant in the program,” said Jeffrey Horrell, Dean of Libraries at Dartmouth and co-convener of the partnership’s directors’ group. “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,” said Judith Nadler, Director and University Librarian at the University of 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.”

The launch of Borrow Direct at the University of Chicago is made possible by a generous gift from the Rhoades Foundation with the cooperation of Julius Lewis, AB’50, AM’54.              

UChicago’s new agreement with Ivy League universities and MIT expands upon the local success of UBorrow, another consortium-based borrowing partnership that gives UChicago users access to more than 90 million volumes at regional research libraries participating in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. 

More information about using Borrow Direct will be available as the University of Chicago Library implements the service this fall.