Borrowing Materials from NOBLE

Who?

All PA students may borrow books and other materials from NOBLE, the North of Boston Library Exchange.

What?

NOBLE is a consortium of 27 public and college libraries with a total collection of over 3 million items.

When?

You may search the NOBLE online catalog at any time and request that items be brought from the owning library to Phillips Academy.  Delivery trucks run five days a week between the libraries; however, to be on the safe side you should allow a week to get materials that are listed as available.  If an item that you want is checked out, your request will be placed in the queue, but it might take several weeks for you to receive it.

Where?

When you search the OWHL catalog, by default you are searching just our physical collection.  If you want to search the NOBLE collection, use the drop down menu to change the search scope.

Why?

Sometimes, 120,000 items just isn’t enough!  The NOBLE consortium was formed to facilitate resource sharing. Individual libraries can concentrate on building unique collections, and patrons of all of the member libraries benefit.  The public library members of the consortium own lots of CDs (including audio-books) and DVDs that we don’t own.  The colleges have some specialty collections that go in depth in areas covered by their curriculum.

How?

In order to request books and other materials from NOBLE libraries, you will need to get a PIN number.  See any librarian for help with this.