BLC 101

Charlie Barlow is executive director of the Boston Library Consortium (BLC), working to empower a coalition of libraries in the northeastern United States to share knowledge, infrastructure, and resources at scale. Prior to BLC, he served as vice president for strategic initiatives and programs at the Associated Colleges of the Midwest and held academic and administrative appointments at the University of Chicago and Roosevelt University. Charlie serves on the boards of directors for the Association for Collaborative Leadership, Housing Choice Partners, and the National Public Housing Museum.

  cbarlow@blc.org

Cate Harriman joined BLC as Program Manager in March 2022. She specializes in library administration and professional development programming. Previously, she served as Program Coordinator for Teacher & Student Programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago. During her tenure at the Newberry, she produced over 250 professional development programs for Chicago-area educators and spearheaded the implementation of credit-bearing virtual professional learning seminars. Cate received a dual degree in Political Science and English from Millikin University.

charriman@blc.org

Amahl McHenry joined as BLC's Executive Assistant and Membership Coordinator in April 2023 and was appointed as Operations Manager in June 2024. As a former Director of Inbound Marketing and Strategy at a digital agency in Portsmouth, NH, Amahl brings expertise in digital outreach, strategy development, project management, and multi-team administration. Amahl provides executive support to the Executive Director and works diligently to engage and sustain the BLC Communities, promoting sharing of infrastructure, knowledge, and resources through collaborative projects across BLC's member institutions. Amahl holds a BA in English and Political Science from the University of New Hampshire.

amchenry@blc.org

Marc Hoffeditz joined BLC in September 2023 as the inaugural Resource Sharing Program Manager. With a decade of public service experience in academic libraries, he joins the BLC from Tufts University where he served as the Library Coordinator for the Edwin Ginn Library at The Fletcher School. Outside of the library world, Marc serves on the Board of Directors for Community Cooks, a Somerville based non-profit that mobilizes volunteer cooking teams to serve various human service organizations. Marc is currently pursuing his MLIS from San José State University.

mhoffeditz@blc.org

Ben Ide joined the BLC team as the new Systems Manager in December 2023. With three decades of library experience, he has been the head of technical service at three universities, most recently Harvard and BLC member library the University of Hartford, where he led Resource and Metadata Services. Ben has overseen training and implementation for several integrated library system migrations, both open source and legacy systems. Ben holds library science degrees from Southern Connecticut State University (bachelor) and Simmons University (master). In his free time, he teaches and studies at the Enfield Fencing Club.

bide@blc.org