A key element of OCLS's strategic plan 2015-2020 is our commitment to demonstrating value. As such, we recognize the importance of accountability and demonstrating qualitative and quantitative value to our stakeholders.
Since 2013, OCLS has been collecting and reporting annual Performance and Value Indicators (P&VIs) to our stakeholders. We are now taking one step further in our commitment to accountability by releasing visual summaries of these indicators.
Full access to Frontier Life: Borderlands Settlement and Colonial Encounters, a digital collection of primary sources from 1650-1920 including material from the Hudson Bay Archives and the Glenbow Archives, is now available to all libraries across Canada thanks to a collaboration between Consortia Canada and Adam Matthew.
Consortia Canada, Adam Matthew, and 18 leading academic institutions collaborated to open this content to libraries and educational institutions nationwide, including all library types: public, post-secondary, special, archives, museums and K-12 schools. The collaboration unlocks important primary sources to provide the broader community with a comparative view on the various colonial frontiers across the globe.
See the vendor's press release for more details and for information about how your library can set up access.
Subscribing colleges may have received a message from Career Cruising about the change of their company name to Xello. Please note this has no affect on your current Career Cruising subscription. The name change applies to the company and their product for K-12. For post-secondary subscribers, the product name will remain Career Cruising. The only change will be that future communications will come from @xello.world email addresses, rather than @careercruising.com addresses. We will update the vendor contact information in ERMA, once we have the updated email addresses. In the meantime, any emails sent to the old @careercruising.com addresses will be redirected.
The Learning Portal, an exciting collaboration between Ontario college libraries, several Ontario college learning centres, and OCLS, launched today September 5, 2017 at http://www.tlp-lpa.ca/
As announced last winter, the Learning Portal delivers open learning resources and services for Ontario’s college students, while providing consistent library and learning centre support for faculty. The portal also supports partnerships with OntarioLearn and eCampusOntario.
The CLEAR Local Steering Committee and OCLS are pleased to announce the launch of the CLEAR discovery layer integration with Ex Libris’s Summon. Colleges participating in OCLS’s CLEAR Local opt-in service and using the Summon discovery layer will now be able to integrate permitted uses information into EDS search results:
Any CLEAR Local college that would like to add the Summon integration should contact Coralee Leroux at OCLS to set up the integration and schedule training.
Want to learn more? Watch the recorded webinar on the CLEAR discover layer integration: https://youtu.be/yq9QJZkcjk8 Or contact Coralee directly.
In this month's issue of InsideOCULA you can read about The Learning Portal, an Ontario Libraries' collaboration to provide easy access to open learning resources and services.
The askON virtual reference service has transformed in the years since it launched in 2008, keeping pace with developments in online learning. Through the hard work, dedication, and direction of the askON college library staff, askON has flourished into an exceptional service for college students, faculty, and staff.
With a significant traffic increase from both increased student and faculty awareness as well as a proactive chat pilot, the fall 2016 semester has brought changes to the askON staff experience, and they have adjusted to higher traffic levels remarkably while continuing to provide an excellent level of customer service.
The Learning Portal / Le Portail d'Apprentissage is a collaboration between the Ontario college libraries (HLLR), several Ontario college learning centres, and the Ontario Colleges Library Service (OCLS). The project began in 2015 as a library support space built within OntarioLearn but has grown to include a standalone website. The project aims to provide easy and equitable access to open learning resources and services to Ontario's online college students and to provide a consistent, province-wide academic support platform for faculty to use for course and assignment design.
OCLS is pleased to announce the launch of OCLS Atrium, our new collaborative workspace for the Ontario college libraries! Officially launching tomorrow, Tuesday, August 30th, 2016, OCLS Atrium will support all the activity that used to exist in 03, including document sharing, collaborative calendars, discussion boards, and more!
Members of the spaces that were migrated from O3 can expect an email tomorrow with information about how to access their new Atrium spaces. The URL for accessing Atrium’s public spaces will also be provided here tomorrow.
We hope our new OCLS Atrium workspace provides a fresh environment to support collaboration and collective activity amongst the college libraries.
HLLR and OCLS are pleased to announce the launch of the CLEAR central instance on August 22, 2016. CLEAR, which stands for College Libraries Electronic Access Rights, brings Scholars Portal’s OCUL Usage Rights (OUR) database to the college libraries. The CLEAR central instance allows college libraries to display permitted uses to students, faculty, and staff for eresources that have licence agreements negotiated by OCLS, enabling library users to see at a glance how they can use a specific resource.
A key element of OCLS's 
OCLS is pleased to announce the launch of OCLS Atrium, our new collaborative workspace for the Ontario college libraries! Officially launching tomorrow, Tuesday, August 30th, 2016, OCLS Atrium will support all the activity that used to exist in 03, including document sharing, collaborative calendars, discussion boards, and more!