Borrow Direct Partnership Expands to Include Harvard Library and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)

Columbia University Libraries is pleased to announce the addition of Harvard Library and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) to Borrow Direct, a service enabling faculty, students, and staff of Columbia University to borrow books and music scores directly from the libraries of Brown University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is expected to join by late October 2011.

This expansion increases the number of volumes available to Columbia scholars from more than 45 million to almost 70 million.

Participating Harvard libraries include Widener Library (Humanities and Social Sciences), Countway Library (Medicine), and the Andover Library (Theology). In addition, books held at the Harvard Depository that were deposited by, or from, these three collections can be obtained through Borrow Direct.
The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) has partnered with Borrow Direct to enable search, discovery, and request of its unique collections through the Borrow Direct catalog. CRL is a consortium of more than 240 academic and research libraries that provides through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery access to more than five million publications, including
 
  • 6,500 international newspapers, many dating to the 1700s—the largest collection of circulating newspapers in North America;
  • 4,500 U.S. newspapers, many dating to the colonial era, including 2,000 ethnic titles;
  • More than 38,000 foreign journals that are rarely held in U.S. libraries;
  • More than 800,000 foreign dissertations, mostly from European universities;
  • Area Studies – Major microform and paper collections from Africa, Latin America, Middle East, Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, and more.
Faculty, students, and staff of Columbia University can now discover CRL materials via the Borrow Direct catalog. Requests for CRL materials will be routed through the Interlibrary Loan (ILL) system, allowing for longer loan periods of not only books, but also dissertations, journals, and newspapers in print or microform.
For questions about using Borrow Direct, visit the Libraries’ Borrow Direct Information Page.