OCLS is pleased to welcome Mohawk College as the newest member of the eBook Consortium Project. The goal of the eBook Project is to develop a consortial ebooks solution for the Ontario college libraries. As of November 2015, there are now twenty-three colleges participating in the project.
Participating colleges have access to a growing core collection of more than 168,000 titles in a wide variety of subject areas. For more information, please visit the eBook Consortium Project.
From all of us at OCLS, we wish you a wonderful holiday season and the best for 2016!
OCLS offices will be closed from December 25, 2015 to January 1, 2016 inclusive. We will reopen on Monday January 4, 2016. Systems will remain operational and will be monitored during the holidays.
by Stacey Boileau, OCLS Services and Support Associate
With the release of the new OCLS Cataloguing Workflow, you may have heard about Linked Data preparation efforts, or you may have heard that MARC21 will eventually be replaced. Here is a basic explanation of what is currently happening with Linked Data as it relates to current OCLS partnerships (Sirsi, OCLC, iii).
EBSCO has recently upgraded the Did-You-Mean feature for EBSCO Discovery Service to offer improved search suggestions.
From the vendor:
The Did-You-Mean feature for EBSCO Discovery Service™ was recently upgraded by leveraging aggregated usage data as part of the suggestion algorithm. The end result is better recall and precision for search suggestions.
Customers who had the previous version enabled have been automatically upgraded. You can verify your account settings by logging in to EBSCOadmin and following the steps outlined on the EBSCO Support Site.
As of 1 January 2016, ScienceDirect will no longer support Internet Explorer 8.
From the vendor:
Why are we ceasing support of IE8?
We are following Microsoft’s directive to focus our support on newer, officially-supported IE browser versions. Microsoft announced in 2014 that, as of January 2016, it would only support the most recent IE browser version with technical support and security updates. We strongly encourage our customers to follow Microsoft’s directive as well by updating to more recent versions of IE. Additionally, users can move to the latest versions of the Chrome or Firefox browsers for an optimal ScienceDirect experience.
By removing IE8 from our support list, we will be able to provide the following future enhancements:
The Ontario Colleges Digital Library (OCDL) Learning Objects sub-committee is pleased to present the Ontario Colleges Digital Library YouTube Channel. It is a showcase of the current information literacy work going on at Ontario college libraries.
The channel has two main areas:
Subscriptions which link to all Ontario College Libraries that currently have a YouTube Channel
Playlists which house relevant videos from these colleges according to three themes:
ProQuest has announced that the ebrary and EBL platforms will be upgraded to Ebook Central in the next six to nine months. Your URLs will be automatically redirected to the new platform at the time of your upgrade.
It is your responsibility to stay up to date on this transition. To ensure you receive updates, you can
sign up for updates about the transition to Ebook Central by navigating to the Ebook Central Support Centre and selecting "Notify Me"
fill out ProQuest's contact form and select the products for which you would like to receive updates
askON grows by one library with the addition of Lambton College Library, who launches their service today. Students can click to chat or TEXT (226) 909-2275 for assignment help.
OCLS is pleased to welcome 
The Ontario Colleges Digital Library (OCDL) Learning Objects sub-committee is pleased to present the 
Humber's LRC Library and Learning Commons opened in September 2015.