University of Chicago joins Borrow Direct, expanding access for MIT and other partner institutions

MIT will soon be able to tap into the book collections of yet another top institution when the University of Chicago joins Borrow Direct, a partnership that allows for the sharing of library materials between member institutions, this fall.

The Reading Room, Mansueto Library, University of Chicago. Photo by John Schiebel

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 already 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 over 50 million volumes in the school’s 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 Ann Wolpert, MIT’s Director of Libraries, when MIT joined the partnership in 2011.

Since the Borrow Direct service was implemented at MIT, 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, or go directly to MIT’s WorldCat to search for books from Borrow Direct libraries.