The service began within and slowly spread to all the members of the Ivy League, and has expanded since 2011 with the inclusion of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to non-Ivy (often so-called "Ivy Plus") institutions.
The Borrow Direct system will not allow patrons to place requests for items that the library believes to be available for checkout locally.
[2] Borrow Direct went live in fall 1999 after a four-year planning and development period during which the three founding institutions, Columbia, Penn, and Yale, collaborated with the Research Libraries Group (RLG) for project management and assessment.
Borrow Direct expanded to seven member libraries in 2002 with the addition of Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Princeton.
[3][4] Since its inception, Borrow Direct has successfully filled over 1.8 million user requests.