Many thanks to those of you who took time to fill in the recent survey about Borrow Direct. The results have been helpful to us in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of the current service and in pointing to areas of further development. I've outlined below the major points that emerge from the data.

Patricia Renfro

Deputy University Librarian

The service gets strong ratings on:

• speed, efficiency and ease of use
• increased availability of materials
• the improvement over interlibrary loan
• superiority to recalling books
• updates on request status

• ability to renew (this is by far the strongest criticism of the service. This functionality is promised in a future release of the software - we don't yet have a date)
• more libraries (we're very pleased to announce that Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth and Princeton will be joining Borrow Direct early this fall semester)
• a better search interface (the system vendor is developing a new interface - beta versions promise a significant improvement - again no firm date for the new release)
• delivery to departmental libraries and the Health Sciences Library – (we’re exploring what we hope will be better and faster ways to deliver materials to the patrons at the Health Sciences Library. Long term we hope to develop a delivery service for Morningside Libraries as well)
• better publicity for the service (we'll be taking a number of approaches to this - thanks for alerting us to it)
• a way to request volumes from a multi-volume set (the software is weak in this area. It is possible to request a specific volume from a multi-volume set by entering the volume number in the notes area on the request confirmation page. Unfortunately, if you need more than one volume from a set is desired, you do need to make a separate request for each volume)
• faster searching and requesting (some of you noted that searching and requesting is too slow. This depends greatly on the speed of your online connection. The Z39.50 search is reaching out to a number of catalogs to gather and pull back bibliographic and circulation status information. It does take a bit longer to gather this data from multiple locations than a simple CLIO search.)
• a few of you wanted fewer e-mail notifications (it would be terrific if the software were sophisticated enough to allow you to indicate your preferences for notification when you make requests - I fear we're some way from offering that - and most of you like the status updates)

Your answers and comments indicated to us that we need to clarify a couple of things:

• you can request items on Borrow Direct that are charged out to other Columbia patrons. Unfortunately the system isn't clever enough to know when an item is missing from the shelf and it is therefore necessary to inform staff at a circulation desk of this so that they can change the item status to missing. Then you can make a Borrow Direct request.
• there "is" a link to Borrow Direct from CLIO - when you're looking at a record in CLIO the Borrow Direct link shows in the top right hand corner
• each volume of a multiple volume set must be requested on a separate Borrow Direct request at the same session.
• the Borrow Direct software looks at each location and whether there is an item checked out associated with that location. Unfortunately this means that a multiple volume set with a single volume checked out will be viewed as ineligible by the Borrow Direct software.

"the biggest improvement in library services in a quarter of a century" (faculty member)