Request Items

Services at a Glance

Allow 3 to 5 business days for BorrowDirect and ReCAP materials to arrive. ILL materials can take 1 to 2 weeks. Severe weather can delay deliveries.

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BorrowDirect

BorrowDirect enables current faculty, students, and staff from Columbia, Barnard, and Union Theological Seminary to request material from: Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Princeton, Stanford, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. BorrowDirect items arrive in 3 to 5 days, circulate for 16 weeks, and have no renewals. You may access the BorrowDirect website after logging on with your credentials.

Interlibrary Loan (ILL)

ILL enables eligible Columbia University affiliates to borrow material from other libraries or obtain copies of articles or book chapters from titles that are not owned or available at Columbia University Libraries. ILL items generally arrive within two weeks. Please see full ILL instructions on the Columbia Library site. While you may return ILL items to Barnard, please note that they should be returned one day in advance, as we will need to send them to the ILL office in Butler.

ReCAP

Columbia-owned items may be checked out for a semester with ten renewals; Princeton & NYPL items may be checked out for 16 weeks, no renewals. ReCAP is short for Research Collections and Preservation Consortium. Columbia University operates ReCAP jointly with Princeton University and New York Public Library. In Fall 2017, the three ReCAP partners launched a Shared Collection Service and CUL added more than 7 million new items from the Princeton University and New York Public Library collections to its CLIO catalog. This expanded access provides seamless discovery and direct request of the ReCAP materials of all partners.

Purchase Suggestions

If you are not seeing an item in our collection via CLIO, but think we should own it, please fill out this brief form to request an item for purchase.