Technology

Community of Interest

Community Charge

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 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.

BLC Technology Survey

Every year, the Technology COI sends out 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, library staff 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. 

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.

Conveners

Viral Amin
Co-chair
Reference Librarian for Electronic Resources
Bentley University
vamin@bentley.edu 

Janice Christopher
Co-chair
Systems Librarian
University of Connecticut
janice.christopher@uconn.edu

Membership

The COI is open to systems librarians, developers, technologists, and anyone involved in creating and providing information technology services at BLC member libraries.

Meetings

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

Join BLC Technology COI

Complete the form below to join BLC's Technology COI. You'll automatically be added to the email group and shared Google Drive.