Pat Schafer, accompanied by Marcy Rosenkrantz and Susan Currie, reported on Cornell’s impending participation in Borrow Direct, a partnership with the originators, Columbia, Penn and Yale, and new members, Princeton, Dartmouth and Brown. Borrow Direct will allow patrons at any partner library to search across the partnership’s holdings and make requests, independent of library staff, for materials not available for circulation on her campus. Answering questions, Pat later explained that the software would verify that the item is not locally available, but would enable borrowing materials owned by but currently checked out at the home institution. The first iteration will be limited to “returnables,” a.k.a. monographs, which should concentrate traffic on humanities and social sciences resources.
The objectives are speedy fulfillment (four-days is the current turnaround) and lower cost. Borrow Direct will not replace Interlibrary Services but augment it by, in effect, creating new patrons. The service’s software levels the load of borrowing across the entire partnership, which, Pat observed, might actually make Cornell a net borrower.
Question and answer revealed several nuances:
- Software primitivity limits requests to a single volume and prohibits renewals.
- Lending is not automatic. Staff can detect fragile or rare materials at point of paging, and collections or parts of collections can be exempted from Borrow Direct.
- The software can detect patron status and refuse service to problem borrowers.
- Reports on what is borrowed, and from where, are part of the package.
For a look at, if not a use of, functioning systems, see http://www.library.upenn.edu/services/borrowing/borrowdirect.html and http://www.library.yale.edu/ill/borrowdirect.html