BorrowDirect allows Harvard students, faculty and staff to request items from partner libraries for delivery to Harvard, free of charge.
If you have already searched HOLLIS and the book or item you need is not available, try searching our partner institutions’ collections in BorrowDirect.
What to Know
- Available materials usually arrive within four business days and must be picked up in person.
- You will be notified via email when your materials are available for pickup.
- Loans are for 16 weeks; renewals are not allowed.
- View pending requests in your Interlibrary Loan account; view checked-out materials in your HOLLIS account.
- BorrowDirect materials can be returned to any Harvard library.
- If an item you borrowed via BorrowDirect is lost or damaged, you will be charged a fee. The fee is determined by the institution that loaned the material, not by Harvard Library.
- Please consult our BorrowDirect FAQs to learn more about BorrowDirect.
What Can Be Borrowed
- Books, A/V materials, musical scores, microforms, and any other materials our partner libraries choose to make available to BorrowDirect.
What Can’t Be Borrowed
- Books owned by and available through Harvard Library
- Books assigned to reference, reserve, or rare book collections by the owning library
- Bound journals or journal articles
- Any materials that can only be used in-library
If You Are On-Site at a Partner Library
Harvard students and faculty can visit and check out books at BorrowDirect libraries using their Harvard ID.
What to Know
- You'll need your Harvard ID. A staff member at the partner library will ask you to log in to your BorrowDirect account as authorization for access.
- Books you borrow directly from one of these partners should be returned directly to the owning library, not to a Harvard Library facility.
BorrowDirect Libraries
- Brown University Library
- Columbia University Libraries
- Cornell University Library
- Dartmouth Library
- Duke University Libraries
- Harvard Library
- Johns Hopkins University, The Sheridan Libraries
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries
- Penn Libraries
- Princeton University Library
- Stanford Libraries
- The University of Chicago Library
- Yale Library