A statewide cooperative borrowing program allows participants to search for books that Temple libraries do not have available or do not own. The program is free of charge to anyone who uses it.
Temple University Libraries is participating in the Pennsylvania Academic Library Consortium Inc. (PALCI) Direct Borrow Program.
PALCI is a collaboration of 35 academic libraries in Pennsylvania. Participating colleges and universities include the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie-Mellon, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Lehigh and Swarthmore.
This organization offers on-site access, faculty borrowing, group-membership pricing for electronic databases and the development of a combined online catalog of its member libraries.
If a participating PALCI library has a copy of a book available, a request may be made. If the request for a book through the Direct Borrow Program is in Paley Library, the request will be denied. This happens because if the book is available from a home library, the program does not allow book requests from another library and the request is rejected.
Students and faculty can access the Direct Borrow Program from any computer on Paley Library’s homepage at www.library.temple.edu, or from a home computer. From this Web site, participants can make requests, which will go directly to the receiving library. The book will be shipped in two to four business days.
Books can be searched on the Web site by author, title or subject.
If the university library doesn’t have a book, this program uses libraries from other schools in the network to fill the request.
The Direct Borrow Program is faster than requesting a book through the library because the program uses the IDS shipping company, which takes two to four days to ship the book as opposed to two weeks.
“We think it’s an excellent program where seven million books are available for search and instant feedback for the items available,” said Penelope Myers of Access Services at Paley Library.
Any registered student can access the program. Temple faculty, administration and staff also are can use the resources available through the program.
More than 100 students, graduate students and faculty members have used the program.
The student or faculty member who makes the request will receive several e-mails confirming the status of the request. A final e-mail will be sent to inform the participant that the request is available for pickup at the library.
In the future, other items such as newspapers and magazines will be available through the Direct Borrow Program.
“We are trying to improve things that will allow students and faculty to acquire the materials they need more easily,” Myers said.
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