Background
The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation had its genesis in another partnership: namely, that between Columbia, Penn, and Yale to develop the highly successful BorrowDirect resource-sharing service. BorrowDirect went live in Fall 1999. In 2002, the partnership expanded to 7 member institutions, with the addition of Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Princeton. In 2011, the partnership grew again, to 9, with the addition of Harvard and MIT. Between 2013 and 2016, it grew to include its current thirteen institutions, with the addition of the University of Chicago, followed by Johns Hopkins, Duke, and Stanford.