Boston Library Consortium

Last updated
Boston Library Consortium, Inc.
AbbreviationBLC
Formation1970;54 years ago (1970)
Type 501(c)(3), charitable organization
04-2605198
Location
Region
New England
Membership
26
President
Mary Piorun
Executive Director
Charlie Barlow
Revenue
US$815,818 (2022)
Expenses US$762,730 (2022)
Staff
5
Website blc.org

The Boston Library Consortium (BLC) is a library consortium based in the Boston area with 26 member institutions across New England.

Contents

Membership and governance

The Boston Library Consortium is a consortium of twenty-six institutions: sixteen in Massachusetts, five in Connecticut, one in New Hampshire, one in Rhode Island, and two in Vermont. The Internet Archive is an affiliate member. [1] Member institutions represent a mixture of liberal arts colleges, research universities, public and private higher education institutions, special libraries, and public libraries. New members may join the BLC if they are based in the northeastern United States and if their application is approved by a two-thirds vote of the board of directors. The BLC is funded through membership dues. [2]

The BLC is administered by an Executive Director and governed by a board of directors. Each member institution of the BLC is represented on the Board by the chief librarian of its principal library. According to its bylaws, the consortium's purpose is "to share human and information resources so that the collective strengths support and advance the research and learning of the members’ constituents." [3]

Members

Current members include the following institutions: [4]

History

The BLC was founded in 1970 and officially incorporated in 1977, consisting originally of five institutions. It had grown to twelve institutions by 1993, seventeen by 2014, and nineteen by 2019. Former members include Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [6] The BLC partnered with the Faxon Company to launch development of a union list of serials in 1982. [7] BLC executive directors have included Hannah Stevens as of 2000, [8] Barbara Preece as of 2002, [9] Melissa Trevvett as of 2010, [10] Susan Stearns from 2014 to 2020, [11] and Charlie Barlow since 2020. [12]

Activities

Major BLC areas of activity include resource sharing and professional development. The BLC runs a "BLC Leads" program to foster leadership development among member library staff, [13] a reciprocal borrowing agreement through which faculty and other patrons affiliated with any member library can borrow materials for free from other member libraries, [14] a shared virtual catalog and rapid delivery of materials between libraries to fulfill patron requests, [15] cooperative purchasing of scholarly resources, [16] and hosting of communities of interest to foster discussion and collaboration among member libraries. [17] Past activities included cooperative collecting and sharing of materials in select subject areas, such as women's studies. [18]

In 2007, the BLC partnered with the Open Content Alliance (OCA) to digitize BLC member libraries' out-of-copyright print collections and make them freely available online through the Internet Archive. [19] To fund this initiative, the BLC and its members pledged more than $845,000 over two years. [20] This partnership made the BLC the first large-scale consortium to embark on a self-funded digitization project with the OCA. [21]

In 2014, the BLC, along with the Orbis Cascade Alliance and other groups, advocated against a publisher price increase on e-books, which they feared would negatively impact academic library budgets. [22]

From 2014 to 2023, the BLC administered the Eastern Academic Scholars' Trust (EAST), a collective collection initiative across more than one hundred academic libraries throughout the eastern United States. [23] [24] EAST member libraries have committed to retaining over six million volumes. [25] EAST's purpose is "preserving the print scholarly record and ensuring its availability for scholars, students and faculty." Under BLC auspices, the EAST initiative received startup grants totaling $1.5 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Davis Educational Foundation in 2014–2015. The BLC provided EAST with staffing and administrative support, technical infrastructure, financial services, and general oversight. By 2018, EAST had become self-supporting through institutional membership fees. [26] In June 2023, EAST became an independent nonprofit organization. [24]

Since 2021, the BLC has pursued a program for controlled digital lending. [27] In 2022, the Davis Educational Foundation awarded the BLC a grant of $215,000 to "accelerate the implementation of controlled digital lending as a mechanism for interlibrary loan." [28] In 2023, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a U.S. federal government agency, awarded the BLC a National Leadership Grant for Libraries totaling $249,221 to "support and scale a reusable and sustainable solution enabling controlled digital lending as a component of libraries’ interlibrary loan services." [29]

In October 2023, the BLC became the new fiscal sponsor of Project ReShare, a community of libraries, consortia, information organizations, and developers that has been developing and implementing open-source software for library resource sharing since 2018. [30]

Related Research Articles

Interlibrary loan is a service that enables patrons of one library to borrow physical materials and receive electronic documents that are held by another library. The service expands library patrons' access to resources beyond their local library's holdings, serving as "an integral element of collection development" for libraries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet Archive</span> American nonprofit digital archive

The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet. As of February 4, 2024, the Internet Archive holds more than 44 million print materials, 10.6 million videos, 1 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.8 million images, 255,000 concerts, and over 835 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Its mission is committing to provide "universal access to all knowledge".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Five College Consortium</span> Group of colleges in Western Massachusetts, US

The Five College Consortium comprises four liberal arts colleges and one university in the Connecticut River Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts: Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, totaling approximately 38,000 students. They are geographically close to one another and are linked by frequent bus service that operates between the campuses during the school year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Research library</span> Library that supports scholarly research

A research library is a library that contains an in-depth collection of material on one or several subjects. A research library will generally include an in-depth selection of materials on a particular topic or set of topics and contain primary sources as well as secondary sources. Research libraries are established to meet research needs and, as such, are stocked with authentic materials with quality content. Research libraries are typically attached to academic or research institutions that specialize in that topic and serve members of that institution. Large university libraries are considered research libraries, and often contain many specialized branch research libraries. The libraries provide research materials for students and staff of these organizations to use and can also publish and carry literature produced by these institutions and make them available to others. Research libraries could also be accessible to members of the public who wish to gain in-depth knowledge on that particular topic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Little East Conference</span>

The Little East Conference (LEC) is an NCAA Division III intercollegiate athletic conference. The member institutions are located in all six states of New England.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference</span>

The Massachusetts State Collegiate Athletic Conference (MASCAC) is an intercollegiate athletic conference affiliated with the NCAA's Division III. Full member institutions are all located in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with some affiliate members also located in Connecticut and New Hampshire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massachusetts College of Art and Design</span> Public art college in Boston, Massachusetts

Massachusetts College of Art and Design, branded as MassArt, is a public college of visual and applied art in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1873, it is one of the nation's oldest art schools, the only publicly funded independent art school in the United States, and was the first art college in the United States to grant an artistic degree. It is a member of the Colleges of the Fenway, and the ProArts Consortium.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was a consortium of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts. Its creation was announced in October 2005 by Yahoo!, the Internet Archive, the University of California, the University of Toronto and others. Scanning for the Open Content Alliance was administered by the Internet Archive, which also provided permanent storage and access through its website.

The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management and improved support for teaching and research. In collaboration with the ten University of California Libraries and other partners, CDL assembled one of the world's largest digital research libraries. CDL facilitates the licensing of online materials and develops shared services used throughout the UC system. Building on the foundations of the Melvyl Catalog, CDL has developed one of the largest online library catalogs in the country and works in partnership with the UC campuses to bring the treasures of California's libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations to the world. CDL continues to explore how services such as digital curation, scholarly publishing, archiving and preservation support research throughout the information lifecycle.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences</span> Private university in the United States

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Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Academic library</span> Library attached to a higher education institution

An academic library is a library that is attached to a higher education institution and serves two complementary purposes: to support the curriculum and the research of the university faculty and students. It is unknown how many academic libraries there are worldwide. An academic and research portal maintained by UNESCO links to 3,785 libraries. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are an estimated 3,700 academic libraries in the United States. In the past, the material for class readings, intended to supplement lectures as prescribed by the instructor, has been called reserves. Previously before the electronic appliances became available, the reserves were supplied as actual books or as photocopies of appropriate journal articles. Modern academic libraries generally also provide access to electronic resources.

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A library consortium is any cooperative association of libraries that coordinates resources and/or activities on behalf of its members, whether they are academic, public, school or special libraries, and/or information centers. Library consortia have been created to service specific regions or geographic areas, e.g., local, state, regional, national or international. Many libraries commonly belong to multiple consortia. The goal of a library consortium is to amplify the capabilities and effectiveness of its member libraries through collective action, including, but not limited to, print or electronic resource sharing, reducing costs through group purchases of resources, and hosting professional development opportunities. The “bedrock principle upon which consortia operate is that libraries can accomplish more together than alone.”

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collective collection</span> Form of collaboration between libraries

A collective collection, shared collection, or shared print program is a joint effort by multiple academic or research libraries to house, manage, and provide access to their collective physical collections. Most shared print programs focus on collections of monographs and/or serials. Similar efforts have addressed acquisition and/or retention of microform, federal government documents, and digital collections. Shared print programs often have activities in common with national repositories and archiving programs. Discussions surrounding shared print programs in their current form have come to the forefront as a popular solution to shrinking collection budgets, rising costs of resources, and competing space needs.

References

  1. Freeland, Chris (2021-04-20). "Internet Archive Joins Boston Library Consortium". Internet Archive Blogs. Archived from the original on 2021-04-20. Retrieved 2022-01-19.
  2. "Prospective Members". Boston Library Consortium. Archived from the original on 2021-01-17.
  3. "Bylaws". Boston Library Consortium. March 14, 2014. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  4. "About Boston Library Consortium". Boston Library Consortium. Retrieved 2024-01-07.
  5. "Boston Library Consortium Welcomes Middlebury, Trinity, and Connecticut Colleges". Boston Library Consortium. Retrieved May 30, 2023.
  6. Walsh, Jim (1993). "Effective Library Networking: Local Depository Networks". Administrative Notes: Newsletter of the Federal Depository Library Program. 14 (18): 12–13 via GPO.
  7. Schaffner, Ann C. (1985-02-28). "Implementation of the Faxon Union List System by the Boston Library Consortium". The Serials Librarian. 9 (3): 45–62. doi:10.1300/J123v09n03_06. ISSN   0361-526X.
  8. Leiding, Reba (June 2000). "Understanding the licensing landscape: Highlights of the ACRL preconference". Library Collections, Acquisitions, & Technical Services. 24 (2): 285–287. doi:10.1080/14649055.2000.10765660. ISSN   1464-9055.
  9. Gula, Lori (2002-10-18). "UNH Admitted to Elite Library Consortium" (PDF). University of New Hampshire . Retrieved 2024-01-08.
  10. "Trevvett Joins Boston Library Consortium". Center for Research Libraries . July 9, 2010. Retrieved 2024-01-09.
  11. "BLC's Executive Director Selected". Boston Library Consortium. 2013-10-28. Archived from the original on 2013-10-28. Retrieved 2024-01-09.
  12. Galloway, Ann-Christie (November 2020). "People in the News". Colleges and Research Libraries News. 81 (10): 518.
  13. "BLC Leads". Boston Library Consortium. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  14. "Consortium Card" . Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  15. "The Boston Library Consortium and RapidR: Partnering to Develop an Unmediated Book Sharing Module". Library Science and Administration: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. 2018. p. 716. ISBN   9781522539148.
  16. "E-Resource Licensing". Boston Library Consortium. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  17. "Communities". Boston Library Consortium. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  18. Soete, George J. (August 1998). "Collaborative Collections Management Programs in ARL Libraries". ARL SPEC Kits. 235: 33. hdl:2027/mdp.39015042760267.
  19. Free, David (November 2007). "Boston Library Consortium and Open Content Alliance to provide digitized books". College & Research Libraries News. 63 (10): 624–25. doi: 10.5860/crln.68.10.7886 .
  20. Hafner, Katie (October 22, 2007). "Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web". New York Times: A1, A18. ProQuest   433697758.
  21. Albanese, Andrew (October 15, 2007). "BLC, OCA Join in Digitization Effort". Library Journal. 132 (17): 15–16. ProQuest   196830139.
  22. Wolfman-Arent, Avi (June 16, 2014). "College Libraries Push Back as Publishers Raise Some E-Book Prices". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  23. Kraft, Bob (November 2016). "Curating Collective Collections--Protecting the Scholarly Record: Shared Print at Scale". Against the Grain. 28 (5): 88–91.
  24. 1 2 "BLC and EAST Announce Successful Transition of EAST into Independent Organization - EAST Libraries". 2023-06-12. Retrieved 2024-01-07.
  25. "A library without books? Universities purging dusty volumes". The Seattle Times. 2018-02-09. Retrieved 2019-12-11.
  26. "Purpose & History". Eastern Academic Scholars' Trust. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
  27. Barlow, Nathan Mealey, Michael Rodriguez, Charlie (2021-10-25). "Guest Post - The Library Technology Market's Failure to Support Controlled Digital Lending". The Scholarly Kitchen. Retrieved 2024-01-07.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  28. "CDL Accelerates at the Boston Library Consortium: Will Expand Interlibrary Loan". National Information Standards Organization . January 13, 2022. Retrieved 2024-01-06.
  29. "LG-254935-OLS-23 - Boston Library Consortium, Inc". IMLS . 2023. Retrieved 2024-01-07.
  30. "Project ReShare Selects Boston Library Consortium as its Fiscal Sponsor". Project ReShare. 2023-10-12. Retrieved 2024-01-07.