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Georgia Tech and Emory University now offer students and faculty a shared collection of library resources, sidestepping the traditional interlibrary loan system with immediate access to hundreds of thousands of titles.

The move, a result of the recently constructed Library Service Center, gives faculty, students and staff access to the world of scholarship in new ways, saving time and advancing research and learning as a whole, said Catherine Murray-Rust, dean of libraries at Georgia Tech.

Using the shared collection is easy. Users simply log into their respective university’s catalog and search as usual. The new materials appear without extra steps or further searching.

Additionally, students and faculty at Emory and Georgia Tech will find deliveries to campus both seamless and timely, as nearly all materials will adhere to the 24-hour system developed for the Library Service Center, said Yolanda Cooper, university librarian at Emory.

To date the shared collection includes physical materials housed at the Library Service Center – about 95 percent of Georgia Tech’s collection and 20 percent of Emory’s.

By 2017 leadership at both schools hope to have finalized technology to share the remaining materials in Emory University’s Woodruff, Health Sciences and Pitts Theology libraries and the Georgia Institute of Technology Library.

Special and media collections from both institutions are excluded from the shared collection.