The Ontario Colleges Digital Library (OCDL) launched September 8, 2015 in the OntarioLearn portal. The OCDL provides library services and support to the over 70,000 students who take online courses through OntarioLearn. Over time, and with the collective efforts of the publicly funded college libraries in Ontario, the OCDL will grow to provide access to a suite of eresources and learning objects that will support the needs of online learners.
Access Conference returns to Ontario this year from September 8-11, and will be hosted in Toronto for the first time in its 19 consecutive years running. Known as "Canada's annual library technology conference", Access is a single-steam conference that "brings librarians, technicians, developers, programmers, and managers together to discuss cutting-edge library technologies." The conference will take place in the Bram & Bluma Appel Salon, located on the second floor of the Toronto Reference Library.
In October 2014 the colleges’ Digital Media Services (DMS) research panel commenced a project to provide a recommended solution for an Ontario college system-wide streamed media infrastructure. Recognizing that each college provides digital media to their users in a manner best supported by their institution—including subscription services (e.g. Films on Demand, NFB Campus, CBC Curio), titles hosted by distributors who offers a streaming platform (e.g. McNabb Connolly, McIntyre Media), titles hosted internally at the college, and/or titles hosted by a third party (e.g. OCLS’s VoD)—the DMS panel focused on identifying a viable option for third-party hosting.
Through an RFQ process to find consultants to undertake the applied research, Pertinence.ca and VideoTelephony were selected as the successful bidders. The project was divided into three phases:
As we continue to migrate content to our website and prepare for the eResources Portal to be shut down in the coming weeks, eResources news will no longer be updated on the eResources Portal. eResources news will now be posted exclusively on the OCLS website. Stay up to date with OCLS and eResources news by subscribing to our RSS feed. Simply go to our News page, scroll to the bottom, and click on the orange RSS subscription box or click here. Once there, select your feed reader from the drop down menu.
As of August 7, General Business File, which is included in the CPI.Q, Academic OneFile, and InfoTrac collection from Gale, will be replaced with Gale Business Collection. Other products being replaced by the Business Collection include: PROMT, European Business ASAP, Business Index ASAP, Business & Company ASAP, and Business International & Company Profiles.
What is Gale Business Collection?
From the vendor:
The nearly 4,000 leading business and trade publications of Business Collection are housed on the state-of-the-art InfoTrac platform, which is optimized for periodical research and features:
OCLS and HLLR are excited to announce the launch of the eResources Accessibility Evaluation Project. Under the guidance of the HLLR AODA Research Panel, the project will assist Ontario college libraries in upholding accessibility best practices and becoming compliant with the requirements of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), particularly the January 1, 2020 deadline for accessible eresources.
OCLS is pleased to announce that our askON virtual reference service is transitioning to a new, web-based platform, which will go live in September. The new platform, LibraryH3lp, offers many exciting features including in-platform access to library profiles, askON policies, tools, and resources. The system also streamlines the chat process, allowing college staff working on askON to easily pick up chats, access and create canned messages, and communicate with colleagues from within the platform.
By Marcia Steeves, Copyright Technician, Fleming College Library
Fleming College Library's initial interest in the digital repository project stemmed from a collection of archival photographs in our College's Archives. A wide selection of the photographs had been scanned by a team of Archive volunteers over the past 6 years, but other than being stored on our local network we had no way of making them accessible to our students, staff, faculty and community at large.
OCLS and 
OCLS is pleased to announce that our 
Fleming College Library's initial interest in the digital repository project stemmed from a collection of archival photographs in our College's Archives. A wide selection of the photographs had been scanned by a team of Archive volunteers over the past 6 years, but other than being stored on our local network we had no way of making them accessible to our students, staff, faculty and community at large.