Library Technology Guides

Current News Service and Archive


October 7, 2024

Boston Library Consortium Controlled Digital Lending. BLC is an active champion of Controlled Digital Lending for interlibrary loan, a practice that enables libraries to lend legally acquired materials in a digital format under controlled conditions. CDL replicates the rights afforded to libraries for interlibrary loan, a foundational library practice, long empowered by copyright law and protected by Congress. [Full Announcement].

August 28, 2023

Boston Library Consortium Boston Library Consortium joins the movement to support DOAJ. A new agreement was announced this week between the Boston Library Consortium and Directory of Open Access Journals. This partnership will provide an avenue for BLC's coalition of libraries in the northeastern United States to support DOAJ's work to curate and index nearly 20,000 peer-reviewed, open access journals from around the world. As part of the agreement, seven additional BLC member institutions have pledged support alongside five long-time DOAJ supporters in BLC's network. [Full Announcement].

March 1, 2023

Boston Library Consortium Consorting with the Cooperative. Boston Library Consortium sent a letter to OCLC on behalf of twenty-two of our members, outlining its intent to negotiate group subscriptions that reduce costs and align pricing for OCLC products and services to standard library metrics. BLC's engagement with OCLC's existing feedback structures and senior leadership has been ineffective to date. This letter invites OCLC to have an open and honest discussion about its pricing practices with the organization. Altogether, these twenty-two member institutions spent more than $2.5 million on OCLC products and services in FY2020, representing over one percent of OCLC's subscription revenue that year. BLC has identified substantial inconsistencies in pricing paid by our members when comparing subscription costs against standard library metrics such as enrollment, number of bibliographic records, and usage. [Full Announcement].

September 15, 2021

Boston Library Consortium Boston Library Consortium to implement controlled digital lending for interlibrary loan. The Boston Library Consortium will implement controlled digital lending as a mechanism for interlibrary loan among its interested member libraries, under a new plan approved by its Board of Directors at their August 2021 meeting. In this resource sharing model, items that traditionally would be loaned physically could instead be digitized and lent digitally under controlled conditions. [Full Announcement].

October 18, 2013

Boston Library Consortium Boston Library Consortium secures multi-library document delivery agreement with Reprints Desk. Reprints Desk and the Boston Library Consortium announced that Reprints Desk’s A-Z Academic Document Delivery Collection for full-text retrieval of scholarly research papers will be made available to BLC’s 17 member academic and research institutions. BLC member institutions will benefit through group purchase pricing incentives when they use Reprints Desk’s external document delivery services and award-winning Article Galaxy software platform to retrieve scholarly journal articles that are not available via subscriptions. Reprints Desk will also work with libraries to analyze actual and projected content acquisition costs to best ensure that inter-library loan and document delivery services are used cost effectively. [Full Announcement].