Borrow Direct:
A VISION FOR EXCELLENT SERVICE
Bart Hollingsworth, Brown University
Carol Jones, Yale University
NELINET Resource Sharing Conference 2009
19 June 2009

Borrow Direct Timeline, pt.1
• 1992 - Ohiolink
• 1993 – North American Interlibrary Loan and
Document Delivery Project (NAILLD)
• 1994-1999 – Planning, development, testing
– Library Directors from Columbia, University of
Pennsylvania, and Yale University
– RLG
– software vendor CPS
– Circulation staff

The Why
• Increasing volume of ILL requests
• Rising costs of providing ILL services
• Opportunity to collaborate with peer
institutions and meet provosts’ expectations
• Willingness to experiment and leverage
technologies

The Vision
• Convenient access to collections at peer
institutions; “extended circulation”
• Success factors
– Platform independent
– Turnaround time of 4 business days
– Fill rate of 85%
– Cost less than $10 per transaction

The How
Core service agreements
• Commercial delivery (UPS) to single address
• Reciprocal relationships; no fees
• Current faculty, students, and staff eligible
• Consistent turnaround
• One month loan period
• Books only

Institutional Autonomy
Each institution
• Determine how local patrons will be authenticated
for using Borrow Direct
• Decide which libraries and collections will be
available
• Customize email messages
• Customize paging slips/book bands
• Determine placement of BD within the larger
organization; manage local staffing and workflow

Efficiencies
• Patron-initiated (unmediated)
• Web-based staff module; no client to install
• Fewer processing steps
– Borrowing: update to received and returned
– Lending: print paging slips, retrieve books,
update to shipped, update to complete
• Automatic email notifications at various
steps in the process

More Efficiencies
• No lending request verification
• Software determines lender string
– Which libraries own requested item
– Which libraries have item available
– Load balancing
• Borrow Direct-ILS interaction
– Update to shipped in BD, auto-checkout in ILS
– Discharge in ILS, auto-complete in BD

And a few drawbacks …
• No renewals
• Known item searching
• Multiple volumes of same title require
separate requests
• Automatic emails generated immediately
upon updating of record
• No “note function”

Borrow Direct Timeline, pt.2
• 11/29/1999 – Borrow Direct pilot project began
• Late 2001 - Library directors declare Borrow
Direct pilot project a success and expansion
• Fall 2002 – Four additional institutions join
Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Princeton

Borrow Direct Timeline, pt. 3
• 2007 – Directors, Policy Group, and
Operations Group (BDOG) begin
discussions of future development
• 2009 – 1,000,000th request; 10th anniversary

Impact of Expansion
• More books, more patrons
• In 2000 - 1,547 items borrowed
• In 2008 - 137,548 items borrowed

Brown’s experience
• Same platform used successfully, since
2000 by Boston Library Consortium (BLC)
for Virtual Catalog initiative
• Brown patrons familiar with this model and
the system
• Staff familiar with platform, minimal
training

Brown’s experience
• Brown 2004 study of 200 requests;
– 54% of items obtained through Borrow Direct were owned
by Brown
– 10% of items obtained through ILL owned by Brown
– 36% of items obtained through ILL were held by Borrow
Direct libraries
– 66% of items obtained through Borrow Direct published in
the past 10 years
– 10% of items obtained through ILL published in the past 10
years

Savings
• Shipping costs per item reduced by 2/3
• No fees for borrowing transactions
• Per transaction cost reduced
– Borrowing: ILL $19.72 BD $7.67
– Lending: ILL $20.56 BD $7.29

The Vision for Borrow Direct
• Cost-driven [<$10]
• Automated
• Ease of use
– for readers and
– for staff

What we learned: SURPRISES
• Change user expectation
• Sheer volume
• Meeting turn around time
• Collegiality
• Product Sale
• Underestimated Installation Work
• Equipment & Software

What next?
• New platform
• Expanding membership?
• Strategic collection development?
• Study : weighing resource sharing resources
and collection development budgets

Thanks
Questions?