The BLC Technology Community of Interest serves as a forum for members to share information, collaborate, communicate with vendors, and learn from each other about issues related to library technologies. The COI is open to systems librarians, developers, and other technologists in BLC member libraries, and meets at least twice annually including a meeting at the BLC Networking Day. The Technology COI may include subgroups for specific projects and/or technologies.

Specific areas of focus for the COI are:

• Serve as a forum for information sharing around technology trends and new initiatives
• Collaboratively communicate with vendors to improve and develop products that meet shared needs of BLC libraries
• Organize workshops or other training opportunities for commonly used Library technologies
• Collaboratively develop innovative open source Library applications
• Engage in collaborative user testing for technology platforms in use across member libraries.

In the fall of 2018, members of the Technology COI developed a Technology Survey to collect and document the various technologies used across the consortium.  Included in the survey are systems in place for automation, discovery, link resolvers, authentication, content management, institutional repositories, digital asset management and preservation, library publishing, citation management, cataloging tools, streaming media platforms, ILL services, data visualization, project management and others.  In addition, those libraries who are willing to be contacted by others within the BLC with questions, have included their contact information in the "BLC Staff Contacts" section of the survey.  The Technology COI has committed to reviewing the survey on an annual basis and updating it as needed. If a BLC member library determines the information in the survey is inaccurate or outdated, please inform the chair or co-chairs of the COI who will ensure the updates are made.  The current version of the survey is available here: BLC Technology Survey 2018.

2019 Artificial Intelligence Working Group
The AI working group was tasked with learning about AI and machine learning in libraries, and sharing that information with the BLC. The group was led by Kirill Batyuk (WHOI), and members were Viral Amin (Bentley), Boyhun Kim (URI), and Drew Parker (Brandeis). The group presented on their findings at the 2019 Technology COI Fall Meeting. Their presentations and summary of findings can be found here.  
 

Membership

The membership of the COI is open to anyone involved in creating and providing information technology services at the BLC member libraries. 

Meetings

The Technology COI meets occasionally and often in conjunction with the annual BLC Networking Day.

Past meetings can be found via the Member Events section of the site.