In 2004, six libraries in New England formed the NExpress consortium to make sharing books faster and more cost effective. Powered by INN-Reach, the group is comprised of original members Bates College, Bowdoin College, Colby College, Northeastern University, Wellesley College, and Williams College. In 2007, NExpress grew larger. Middlebury joined and was soon followed by Vassar College, which joined the consortium to take advantage of a new article-sharing system called ArticleReach.

Launched by the group in 2006, ArticleReach is a unique consortial borrowing system that provides NExpress users with print or full-text electronic articles not available from their local campus library. Seamlessly combined with INN-Reach, NExpress makes books and journal articles available from a collection of more than 2.2 million unique titles.

“Fast discovery and delivery of articles through NExpress promotes the catalog as a direct provider of information.”

—Walter Komorowski, NExpress Project Coordinator , Williams College

“Now we let ArticleReach do for us what INN-Reach has done for seven of our libraries over the years. Our staffs love it!" says David Pilachowski, College Librarian at Williams College. "Handling article requests used to be pretty labor intensive and required users and staff to go through many steps. In most cases, local staff no longer see borrowing requests at all.”

It's this one-touch fulfillment that makes INN-Reach, and now ArticleReach, the fastest resource-sharing options around. Soon after ArticleReach was enabled, about 50% of requests went to the lending library automatically and were never seen by the local library staff.

Most important, NExpress pools its significant resources for fast delivery to its user communities. Users request articles in their local WebPAC, the NExpress portal, or from an OpenURL link in a database - where about 95% of requests come from. Users receive an email notification and simply log in to their My Millennium account for a link to the full-text. If a requested article is locally held, ArticleReach will notify users immediately or automatically send the request to the library staff for fulfillment, depending on the library's preference.

“We’ve seen turnaround in 24 hours in many cases, and sometimes even less than an hour,” says Pilachowski. “When we were live-testing ArticleReach, one of our student Library Committee members reported that she had requested and received an article in 90 minutes. She could not believe it! NExpress also makes discovery easier by presenting requesting options at the title level in the online catalog or as a full-text link from a link resolver.”

NExpress also puts library content in the limelight. “Users make direct requests from our catalog and can see exactly where in the system the item they want is held,” says NExpress Project Coordinator Walter Komorowski (also of Williams College). “Fast discovery and delivery of articles through NExpress promotes the catalog, and their library, as a direct provider of information.”