On August 10, the Dartmouth College Library will unveil a new interface to Borrow Direct, a service that gives members of the Dartmouth community access to books at the libraries of Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.

With the system’s new, Google-like search engine, users will no longer have to know what book they want ahead of time; they will be able to search Borrow Direct and discover works they hadn’t already encountered. They will also be able to renew items for a second 42-day loan period and make regular interlibrary loan requests without leaving the system.

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“This new interface provides a more robust search, discovery and delivery platform and as a result we’ll be better able to support the research and teaching of the Dartmouth community,” says Jennifer Taxman, head of access services for the Library. Professor of Economics Douglas Irwin, a frequent user of Borrow Direct, calls it “an invaluable tool for getting access to harder-to-come-by materials.”

First introduced in the Fall 2002, Dartmouth users have borrowed over 65,000 volumes through the system to date. Coming in September, the holdings of the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago (of which Dartmouth is a member) will be added to the Borrow Direct search. And in the future, individual member libraries have the option of adding other collections.

To try out Borrow Direct or find out more about the service, see the Library’s website.