Vendor Library
Welcome to the Vendor Library user guide. The Vendor Library is a curated, read-and-adopt catalogue of pre-assessed vendor records that helps your school screen and manage the privacy, safeguarding and AI risks of its EdTech providers. Each entry is a vendor together with a Processing Operation Assessment (POA) that 9ine has researched and published, so you can judge a provider before any data is shared, then adopt the record into your own logs in one step.
Each entry gives you a clear risk profile drawn from the assessment: whether the vendor processes special category data, whether it uses artificial intelligence and at what risk level, any safeguarding concerns, and its processing-compliance status.
From the library you can:
- Browse the catalogue of vendor tiles, and search, filter and sort to find a provider.
- Open a Preview to read the full assessment and its associated risks, issues, lessons and tasks.
- Quickstart a vendor and its POA into your organisation's Vendor Assessment and POA logs.
- Request access to an entry your organisation cannot yet see.
Once a vendor and POA have been adopted, you can go on to link them to your Records of Processing (RoPA) and Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs), or publish the application to your Application Library. Those actions are carried out in the RoPA, DPIA and Application Library areas respectively, using the record the Vendor Library created for you.
Access to the Vendor Library is included as part of 9ine's Vendor Platform licences. For further information, contact [email protected].
Accessing the Vendor Library
Access to the Vendor Library is included with your organisation's Vendor Platform entitlement. Your organisation's administrator allocates access to individual users in User Management (previously People), available to administrators in the header.
If you have the Vendor Platform but cannot see any entries, your organisation may not have an active Vendor Library entitlement, or access may not yet be allocated to you. Ask your organisation's 9ine Platform administrator to confirm your organisation's entitlement and grant you access.
Browsing and searching the catalogue
The Vendor Library opens as a grid of vendor tiles. To find a provider quickly you can:
- Search by vendor name or POA title.
- Switch pagination bucket to narrow the grid: A–Z, 0–9, Coming Soon, Certified, or All. Each bucket shows a count.
- Sort the grid by release date, vendor legal name, or POA title.
Entries tagged Coming Soon are kept out of the default listing and counted in their own bucket, so the main grid shows the vendors you can adopt now.
Reading a tile: tags and risk indicators
Each tile carries tags and icons so you can screen a vendor at a glance. Tags mark an entry as:
- Coming Soon – published but not yet available to adopt.
- Recently Updated – the assessment has been revised.
- Certified – part of 9ine's certified programme.
Hovering over the icons on a tile shows the entry's key risk indicators: whether it involves special category data, whether it uses artificial intelligence and at what AI risk level, any safeguarding concerns, and its processing-compliance status.
Previewing an entry
Select Preview on a tile to open the full picture before you decide to adopt. The Preview shows the assessment detail and risk indicators, the associated Risks, Issues, Lessons and Tasks, any related libraries, and a Description where 9ine records anything you should know about the assessment. It also shows prior Quickstart and access activity for the entry.
Quickstart a vendor and its Processing Operation Assessment
Quickstart copies a curated vendor and its POA straight into your organisation's Vendor Assessment and POA logs, so you do not have to assess the provider from scratch. Everything on the entry comes across: attachments, additional notes, the logo, and the associated risks, issues, lessons and tasks.
When you select Quickstart, the Platform first checks whether a vendor of the same name already exists in your Vendor Assessment log. You then choose whether to create a new vendor or attach the POA to the existing vendor, so you do not end up with a duplicate.
Quickstart then runs in the background. You can carry on working, and you will receive an email once the vendor and POA are ready in your logs.
Adopted records are flagged as originating from the library by a distinct icon in the first column of the log, so you can tell curated records from ones you created yourself.
Once adopted, the vendor and POA follow the standard Vendor Assessment workflow, where you can review and customise them.
Requesting access to an entry
If your organisation is not entitled to an entry, you can request access to it from the library. Your request is recorded against the entry and shown as a pending request on its tile.
How the library is curated
You browse and adopt library content; you do not author it. 9ine curates the catalogue: 9ine administrators publish vendor and POA data into the library, edit or overwrite entries, and duplicate them. The risk indicators you see on each entry are derived from the POA's own answers, not entered by hand, so the profile reflects the assessment.