Library Standards Alliance Benefits Extended to All BLC Members
The Boston Library Consortium (BLC) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) have announced an agreement to provide NISO Library Standards Alliance (LSA) membership to all BLC members through December 31, 2026.
The agreement will extend full LSA membership benefits to BLC’s 25 member libraries, granting them free access to NISO’s educational webinars program, unlimited participation in NISO Working Groups and Standing Committees, and discounted registration for all non-webinar events, including the annual NISO Plus conference.
BLC also joins NISO as a Voting Member, which gives the lead consortium organization the opportunity to influence the direction of technological advances in information management through driving standards and best practices in the information community. As a Voting Member, BLC may comment and vote on proposed standards and recommended practice projects as well as vote in NISO Board elections.
“BLC is delighted to join the NISO community,” said Charlie Barlow, BLC’s executive director. “LSA membership empowers colleagues across our entire membership network to benefit from a robust suite of professional development offerings and influence future directions in library practice.”
“I’m so pleased to welcome the Boston Library Consortium and its member libraries to NISO,” added Todd Carpenter, NISO’s executive director. “BLC has been a leading innovator in resource sharing, collective collection management, and preservation across its community. Many of these efforts are based upon consistent, standards-based business processes among BLC member libraries. We’re looking forward to benefiting from their perspectives as we work to develop authoritative standards for the information community.”
For more information about this announcement, please contact admin@blc.org or nisohq@niso.org.
About Boston Library Consortium
Boston Library Consortium empowers a coalition of libraries in the northeastern United States to share knowledge, infrastructure, and resources at scale.
Founded in 1970, BLC’s strength lies in its diverse membership network of public and private universities, liberal arts colleges, state libraries, public libraries, and special libraries united by a commitment to champion innovation through collaboration. For more information, visit blc.org.
About NISO
Based in Baltimore, MD, NISO’s mission is to build knowledge, foster discussion, and advance authoritative standards development through collaboration among the cultural, scholarly, scientific, and professional communities. To fulfill this mission, NISO engages with libraries, publishers, information aggregators, and other organizations that support learning, research, and scholarship through the creation, organization, management, and curation of knowledge. NISO works with intersecting communities of interest and across the entire life cycle of information standards. NISO is a nonprofit association accredited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).