News Archive

Studies show that college students often feel sleep deprived. 

The effects of sleep deprivation can be damaging, zapping your ability to study, weakening your immune system, and putting your mental and physical health at risk.

The Learning Portal is here to help students get better sleep and improve their post-secondary performance.

Visit the Sleep Hub today to learn more about the benefits of a good night’s sleep!

We will be performing necessary system upgrades to the OCLS website next week and therefore the OCLS website will be down for a short period on Wednesday, May 20th, from 4:00 to 8:00 p.m.

During this scheduled downtime, the OCLS website, including ERMA, will be unavailable. OCLS’s Single Sign-On (SSO) will also be unavailable, which means that library staff members will be unable to log in to RT ticket tracker, LEAP, and Atrium.

During this period, library staff can continue to communicate with OCLS staff via email and with OCLS’s IT team through RT by emailing rt@ocls.ca. You can also reach OCLS's Director of IT, Alexander Eykelhof, at aeykelhof@ocls.ca.

Thank you for your patience.

OCLS is pleased to welcome Jana Purmalis as Manager of Services, effective March 10, 2020. Some of you may have had the opportunity to meet Jana at the OCLS breakfast or over Zoom in the past two months, but we’d like to take a moment to officially introduce her. 

Before joining OCLS, Jana managed a small team at BGC Engineering, where she was a Librarian and Information Services Manager since 2016. Jana brings a wealth of diverse experience to her role as Manager of Services at OCLS, with 18 years’ experience working in the fields of libraries, education, and research. Jana holds a Masters of Information from the University of Toronto, where she received both an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and a U of T Fellowship, as well as an undergraduate degree in Geography from Ryerson.

The Ontario college libraries and CLO (College Libraries Ontario) have gone above and beyond to support their students, faculty, and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, transitioning quickly into a fully online environment. Click the image below for more details about the work of the individual colleges and CLO.College Libraries Ontario COVID Response

Students often dread taking tests and exams, but test taking doesn’t have to be scary. The Learning Portal offers a toolkit to help students succeed at test taking. 

2019/20 marked OCLS’s 10th year of service to Ontario’s publicly funded college libraries since we formed in 2009 and launched our suite of services in 2010. We are incredibly proud of what we have accomplished in collaboration with the college libraries over the past 10 years. We have doubled the number of services we provide, adding key services such as askON, CORe, and CLEAR, collaborated with the college libraries to continuously improve our services and keep pace with changing needs and technologies, and conducted, collaborated on, and supported a wide range of vital projects in pursuit of our shared goal: improving equitable access across the college library system.

The infographic below highlights just some of what we have accomplished in the past 10 years alongside the Ontario college libraries. We look forward to working together for another 10 years and beyond.

As OCLS's services and structure has changed over time, the division between our eResources Management and Federated Search services has become obsolete, and OCLS has decided to fold Federated Search into the publicly-funded eResources Management service. This change will come into effect for the 2020/21 fiscal year. Please note the following consequences of this change.

Payment for resources once acquired under the Federated Search service will be looped into the colleges’ OCLS eResources Deposit Account. By default, these resources will appear on the colleges’ 2020/21 Deposit Account Estimates. Separate invoicing is still available upon request. Please contact Holly Sarvari hsarvari@ocls.ca if you’d like to continue separate invoicing for your Federated Search resources after 2019/20.

Website users will notice a new addition to their website Dashboards as of today: the User Help Files section. ERMA users in particular will notice even more changes later this month.

We are excited to announce that the OCLS offices will be moving to a new location on November 18, 2019.

Our new address will be:
789 Don Mills Road, Suite 701
Toronto, ON M3C 1T5

Our telephone numbers will remain the same: 1-647-722-9300 / 1-800-268-5560. Email addresses will remain the same as well.

Please update your records and direct all future correspondence to our new address starting on November 18.

Rest assured that there will be no disruption to services during the move. If you have any questions or concerns please contact us at info@ocls.ca. We look forward to continuing to work with you at our new address.

Scholars Portal has launched a new public-facing ACE website along with a staff portal for ACE representatives. The public-facing website links to ACE and the staff portal, and contains information about the service and guides for ACE users, while the staff portal allows ACE representatives to submit, edit, cancel, and view past digitization requests in one location. Additional portal features are being developed by Scholars Portal and webinar training is expected to be hosted this fall.

To access the staff portal, visit the new ACE website and click on "Log in for staff."

For full details, please see Scholars Portal's news release or contact Rebecca (rlafrance@ocls.ca).

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