About BiblioLabTech: technology and AI for academic libraries

BiblioLabTech is a library technology and artificial intelligence company, founded in 2023 and based in Medellín, Colombia. We implement and sustain the open-source platforms that academic libraries run on (Koha, DSpace, DSpace-CRIS and Open Journal Systems) and develop our own AI tools for the work that takes the most time in a library: describing documents, cataloging material and helping users find what the institution already holds. We work remotely with institutions in any country, in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French.

BiblioLabTech at a glance

What we do and for whom

We work with university libraries, research units and academic publishers, on two fronts that in practice are inseparable.

The first is infrastructure: implementing, migrating, hosting and maintaining the systems a library runs on. Koha for collection management and circulation; DSpace and DSpace-CRIS for the institutional repository and research information management; OJS for scholarly journals. All of it on open-source software, with no license fees and with the data in the institution's hands.

The second is applied artificial intelligence for concrete problems in the sector. MetaExtract API extracts the metadata from a PDF and pre-fills the deposit form; BiblioScan AI turns photos of a book into a MARC21 record; BiblioMeta unifies search across all of a library's sources, and BiblioMeta Académico adds natural-language search and remote access for universities; our AI chatbots answer the repetitive questions that occupy reference teams; and the AI Research Assistant summarizes and cites the sources a library already provides.

The people who hire us are usually the library director or the IT director of a university, and they almost always arrive with a problem that has a date attached: a repository without support, an uncataloged backlog, an accreditation that requires evidence of academic output.

How BiblioLabTech started

BiblioLabTech was founded in 2023 by Diego Alejandro Castañeda Londoño and Valeria Perez Rodriguez, with a conviction that still guides what we do: libraries can be transformed with technology without giving up their human purpose and their professional tradition. Technology comes in where the work is mechanical, such as transcribing a field, repeating a search or answering the reading-room hours for the tenth time, and steps back where the work requires a librarian's judgment.

The company began by solving a specific document-description problem and grew along the least flashy and most reliable path: institutions that renewed their contract and then hired a second service. Several of the universities we work with are on consecutive renewal cycles, and that is the indicator we watch most closely.

How we work: our implementation methodology

Every project follows the same sequence, with timelines adjusted to each service.

1. Diagnosis before quoting. We review the current system, the state of the data and what the institution needs. If the project does not make sense as proposed, we say so at this stage, not halfway through.
2. Explicit agreement on the information model. Metadata schema, collection structure, policies, roles and permissions. The decisions postponed until later are the ones that make a repository or a migration fail.
3. Documented infrastructure. We deploy on cloud infrastructure we manage or on the institution's own server, with HTTPS, automatic backups, monitoring and separate test and production environments.
4. Migration with a quality report. Before loading anything, we deliver a diagnosis of the source data: duplicates, empty fields and inconsistent authorities. The institution decides what is corrected and what is migrated as it is.
5. Role-based training on real data. Technical services, circulation, editorial teams and IT receive different training, on their own instance rather than a demo environment.
6. Support after go-live. The first weeks of real operation decide whether a system is adopted or abandoned, so we stay close during that period.

What we specialize in

Our specialization is deliberately narrow: we do not build generic enterprise software, we build library technology.

• Integrated library systems: Koha, including migration from proprietary and open-source systems, circulation configuration and OPAC customization.
• Repositories and research information systems: DSpace and DSpace-CRIS, including integrations with ORCID, ROR, OpenAlex, DataCite and Crossref.
• Scholarly publishing: OJS, with editorial workflow configuration, DOIs through Crossref, ORCID and indexing.
• Description standards: MARC21, RDA, Dublin Core and the application profiles each institution needs.
• Interoperability: OAI-PMH, Z39.50, SRU/SRW, SIP2, SWORD, REST APIs and Handle.
• AI applied to metadata: automatic extraction from documents, image-assisted cataloging, natural-language federated search and assistants restricted to the institution's own sources.

Where we work

BiblioLabTech is headquartered in Medellín, Colombia, with projects in production or in implementation in Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, El Salvador, Puerto Rico and Mexico. We work remotely, with on-site visits when a project justifies them. Our time zone, UTC−5, overlaps the full working day across the Americas and the afternoon in Europe and Africa.

Institutions that have worked with BiblioLabTech include the Escuela Colombiana de Ingeniería Julio Garavito, Universidad ICESI and Universidad Católica Luis Amigó in Colombia; Universidad Continental and Universidad Marcelino Champagnat in Peru; Universidad Americana in Paraguay; Universidad Dr. Andrés Bello (UNAB) in El Salvador; and Información Científica Internacional (Grupo ICI) in Mexico.

Working across several countries taught us something no software documentation covers: accreditation requirements, open access mandates and data protection rules change from one country to another, and an implementation that ignores them works technically but serves the library poorly.

What can be verified about us

We prefer to be evaluated on verifiable facts rather than adjectives.

• A company incorporated in Colombia in 2023 and headquartered in Medellín.
• DSpace repositories and Koha catalogs in production with public, verifiable URLs, listed in our case studies.
• Our own AI tools in continuous operation since 2024, with contracts renewed for more than one term.
• The platforms we implement are open source: the institution keeps its data and can change provider without changing system.
• We administer production Linux servers for libraries in several countries, with responsibility for availability and backups.

You can review the implementations one by one in our case studies, for example the DSpace repository of Universidad Americana in Paraguay or the AI cataloging work at Universidad Continental in Peru, and read what we publish about the craft in our resources.

Working with us

If your institution is considering a change of library system, setting up or rescuing a repository, publishing its journals on OJS or automating the description of its collections, the starting point is a diagnosis. Request a diagnosis and we will reply with what the project involves, how long it takes and what it costs.