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Access to library materials from Borrow Direct universities expands

With the addition of the University of Chicago, the MIT community will have access to more than 50 million volumes from nine university libraries

Beginning in August, MIT will be able to tap into the book collections of yet another top institution when the University of Chicago becomes an active member of Borrow Direct, a partnership that allows library materials to be shared between member institutions.

The University of Chicago Library is the ninth largest research library in North America, with 10.7 million volumes in print and electronic form. Chicago will become the tenth university to join the Borrow Direct partnership, which includes MIT and the libraries of Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton, Yale and Harvard.

Through Borrow Direct, faculty, students and staff from participating institutions can search more than 50 million volumes in the members’ combined library catalogs, and request circulating materials directly from the library where they are held.

“The strength of the combined collections of the outstanding libraries represented in Borrow Direct [is] a tremendous asset to our community and to library users across the cooperative,” said Director of Libraries Ann Wolpert when MIT joined the partnership in 2011.

Since the Borrow Direct service was implemented, MIT users have borrowed nearly 2,500 items from other institutions. The average turnaround time to receive a requested item at MIT is 3.5 days.

Learn more about how to use Borrow Direct here: http://libraries.mit.edu/ordering/borrowdirect.html. Or visit MIT’s WorldCat to search for books from Borrow Direct libraries.

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