Johns Hopkins University this summer joined BorrowDirect, an Ivies Plus consortium that includes the libraries of the Ivy League (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, and Yale), the University of Chicago, and MIT. JHU faculty, staff, and students now have online and in-person access to the more than 50 million volumes held by the consortium members.
BorrowDirect libraries began sharing collections in 1999 with founding institutions Columbia, Penn, and Yale, in partnership with the Research Libraries Group, and later expanded. In the 15 years since its inception, BorrowDirect has filled more than 1.8 million online user requests.
"We were honored to be invited to participate in this consortium," says Winston Tabb, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at Johns Hopkins. "This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to open up the collections of some of the nation's premier research libraries to our users. At the same time, we are able to share the riches of our own holdings with scholars from the other 10 member schools. This is a truly innovative partnership, which draws on the respective strengths of each institution to enable each of us to better serve our own faculty and students."
Through BorrowDirect, users have the ability to search and request material from across the 11 institutions' libraries. Materials are received three to five business days after a request is made. More than 230,000 books, music scores, and other returnable items were loaned to member users in the past fiscal year. Since July 1, when JHU joined the consortium, the university libraries have fulfilled more than 2,855 requests, and borrowers have received more than 2,400 volumes.
To get started with BorrowDirect, visit the JHU libraries home page (library.jhu.edu) and sign on using your JHED ID. From there, you can search the catalog, select a pickup location, and place a request. If BorrowDirect can't fill the request, the system will pass users seamlessly to an interlibrary loan form.
JHU community members are invited to try BorrowDirect and send feedback to BorrowDirect@jhu.edu.
