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.

The COI actively surveys the membership for information on the range of tools, services, and technologies utilized by the member libraries. Find the results of the surveys via the link below.

BLC Technology Survey

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.