IRIS allows students and faculty from the University of Kentucky, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Vanderbilt University to search the library holdings of all three institutions.

UK, UTK, and Vandy faculty and students also may borrow materials from one of the remote libraries through expedited interlibrary loan.

IRIS will foster broad cooperation in collection development and access by these three major research libraries. A user at any of the libraries will have the benefit of the holdings of all three, each of which has particular collection strengths.

By the fall of 1998, the combined holdings of the three libraries will total more than 6 million volumes. Each library's collection includes unique strengths that make the combined IRIS collection an important resource for students and scholars at all t hree institutions.

IRIS will maximize dollars spent on information by the three cooperating institutions through signing cooperative license agreements with vendors for databases, jointly purchasing expensive but infrequently used materials, and cooperatively archiving and preserving little used books and journals.