The latest news from your partners at OCLS
JUNE 2016
College Library Leaders' Summit
By Virginia Roy, Executive Director

The college library directors and managers, along with OCLS's se
nior team, came together on March 7-8 for the College Library Leaders' Summit. Working together, they focused on identifying shared projects and initiatives that would benefit the colleges, their students, and faculty while supporting OCLS and HLLR in achieving their strategic objectives. The summit provided an opportunity to work collaboratively on our shared goals of increasing costs savings and efficiency, and building capacity across the college library system, while reflecting on emerging trends in post-secondary education and in college libraries.  
 
OCLS and HLLR prioritized key projects and initiatives, and began planning the exciting projects we will work on this year. These include:
  • improving college library and library system support for distance education, online and hybrid learning students, faculty and curriculum developers;
  • exploring next-generation library platforms;
  • conducting research on how to identify, develop, and capture meaningful metrics that demonstrate the value of library services to colleges, quantify library service ROI, and establish the impact of libraries on student success; and
  • exploring the collective opportunities for libraries in the development of and access to Open Educational Resources (OERs).
HLLR, OCLS, and college library staff are scoping out and moving forward on these projects that will form the focus for much of OCLS's work in support of HLLR and the college library system for the coming years.
 
They are too numerous to mention by name but OCLS would like to extend its thanks and appreciation to all the participants in the Library Leaders' Summit and especially to the members of the Library Leaders' Summit Working group, who helped make it such a resounding success: Joan Sweeny Marsh, Karen McGrath, Tammy Thornton, Jan Dawson, Thomas Guignard, Maria Ripley, and Virginia Roy.
 
The 2016 College Library Leaders' Summit Attendees. 
OCLS Commits to Project Management Protocols and Practices
by Maria Ripley, Executive Assistant/Administration Manager

There was an ambitious slate of projects identified at the Summit.  So we can do our part in support of the college libraries, OCLS has committed to adopting and standardizing project management, including the development and ratification of project charters by stakeholders and the formalization of project plans. 
 
We kicked off our process with a project management bootcamp facilitated by Dr. Dini Corbett Louren�o, who helped us focus on grassroots project management principles and practices.
One outcome from the boot camp is a set of custom templates that make up OCLS's Project Management Toolkit. We are happy to share our toolkit with you, which include a project charter template and planning worksheets.  
Dr. Louren�o will be back at OCLS on June 20th to conduct a follow-up workshop for several OCLS staff who were unable to participate. OCLS has extended an invitation to participate to the chairs of HLLR's Committees and Working Groups. 
askON Pilots Proactive Support
by Siob�n Linnen, Services and Support Associate

This summer askON is conducting a proactive chat pilot with six participating colleges: Fanshawe, George Brown, Georgian, Lambton, Seneca, and St. Clair. A built-in feature of our virtual reference platform, LibraryH3lp, proactive chat enables library staff to initiate an offer to help students and faculty by reaching out to visitors who are browsing the library website. It's an effective way to reach students who have research questions but may be hesitant to ask for help or are not aware of library services that can assist them. The timer-based trigger allows library staff to reach those students who have been lingering on a college library web page and may potentially be stuck in their search.
 
askON pilot libraries have enabled proactive chat in a few key places on their library websites and within their most-used third-party databases; students and faculty who visit any of these pages during open hours will receive an invitation to chat once a certain length of time has elapsed. Take a look for yourself! Visit Lambton College Library during askON's open hours this summer (Monday to Friday, 12-4).
Over the course of the proactive chat pilot, a task force will investigate whether there is a need for proactive chat in the college libraries using askON, and explore how it could be effectively implemented while maintaining excellent customer service. The pilot will run for 14 weeks until August 12th, with a report delivered to the askON Steering Committee in late July that presents the pilot's early results and makes a recommendation for next steps.
Staff Profile: Thomas Guignard, Director of Services

OCLS is pleased to announce the appointment of Thomas Guignard as Director of Services.
As the College Libraries eBook Consortium Project Manager since 2013, Thomas is well known to the Heads of Libraries and Learning Resources (HLLR) and college library staff, and regarded for the consensus building he has brought to the eBooks Project. In addition to his strong project management and customer service skills, Thomas has over 6 years of academic library leadership, management, and strategic planning experience from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) Library, where he served as Head of Collection Development and Academic Support. He is highly technically literate, and is particularly interested in the emerging library technologies that are having an impact on the college libraries and OCLS's services. Thomas is fluent in English and French, holds a MSc in Engineering, a PhD in Acoustics, and is poised to complete his Masters of Library Science in the Management of Library and Information Services from the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. Read on for the full press release.
Happy COLLECTing!
by Stacey Boileau, Services and Support Associate

OCLS is pleased to announce several important enhancements/fixes to COLLECT. Users can now:
  • Remove all items at once with the addition of a "remove all" button
  • Remove individually select items from their cart
  • Preserve their "My Cart" list to reference items at a later date by emailing the items in their cart

And finally, the citation tool has been fixed, allowing users to email citations in their format of choice or create a file of the selected item citations for download.
CLEAR: The Permitted Uses Pilot
by Nicole Morgan, eResources Services and Support Associate
 
If you attended the 2016 OCLS OLA Breakfast, you heard about a pilot project that will transform the Ontario college library system's method of managing licence agreement permitted uses summaries. The pilot is now officially named CLEAR, or College Libraries Electronic Access Rights. This winter, OCLS licensed Scholar Portal's permitted uses database on behalf of the college libraries, and several colleges are now participating in the pilot that provides local instances of the database, which reflect both their agreements managed by OCLS and those they've made directly with vendors. The next step is to develop linkages between local instances and discovery layers so that library patrons are presented with permitted uses summaries at the initial point of access. If the pilot proves successful, colleges will have the option of accessing the central instance directly (replacing the eResources Portal), or to participate in a new CLEAR opt-in service and set up their own local instances. Either way, CLEAR will put permitted uses info into the hands of your patrons.

Learn more about CLEAR! Participate in one of two introductory webinars on May 31 14:00-15:00 and June 3 11:00-12:00.
Staff Profile: Nathan Howard, Programmer/Analyst

OCLS is pleased to announcement the appointment of Nathan Howard as Programmer/Analyst. Nathan is a recent graduate of George Brown's School of Engineering, Computer Programmer / Analyst program. He is experienced with Linux, Perl, PHP, Bash, Javascript, and Drupal, as well as with relational databases and object-oriented programming. Prior to and during his studies at George Brown, he has engaged in a number of dynamic web projects, including designing, creating, updating, and maintaining commercial websites. A volunteer with the not-for-profit social enterprise Free Geek Toronto, he dismantles and refurbishes computers and makes them available at accessible prices. We look forward to Nathan's expertise and assistance on a number of the key projects in which OCLS will engage this year.
Farewell VoD... Hello Kanopy
By Virginia Roy

Many of you who are veterans of the college library system will remember back to 2002 when the then Bibliocentre launched the Video on Demand (VOD) service. Back then, before the days of YouTube and Netflix, it was a revolutionary service, and over the years it put many bits and bytes of instructional streaming media in front of the keen eyes of students and faculty. Fast forward 14 years and the world is a different place - streaming video is ubiquitous and is for many students, and in many fields of college study, a preferred method of learning. The college libraries recognized this trend, and HLLR's Digital Media Services committee sprang into action, commissioning a study to look for a new streaming media infrastructure that the college libraries could embrace. Enter Kanopyan on-demand streaming video service for educational institutions that has already been embraced by many of the colleges. For the 10 college libraries that relied on VOD, particularly for the very important nursing material, the loop is now complete. By the end of June, all the streaming video content once on VOD will be migrated to Kanopy and the VOD service will be closed. Many thanks to all of VOD's users, customers, and supporters, and a special thanks to Alex Eykelhof, who some might say was the "father" of VOD.
Re-imagining and re-assessing ILS reports: SirsiDynix Consortium Roundtables Project
by Zack Osborne, Information Technology Systems and Services Coordinator

The Ontario colleges' ILS consortium (now referred to as the "Sirsi Consortium") is 20 years old and comprises 13 member libraries. From the early days, members have trusted a series of API reports built by Bibliocentre (OCLS's predecessor) to track and report library and collection use generated from the ILS. In early 2016, OCLS and the consortium members met for a series of roundtable meetings to evaluate these delivered reports and determine if they continue to serve and meet libraries' needs. As the body contracted to administer ILS services, OCLS was interested in asking questions about the utility and value of the reports.
The 13 consortium members were invited to openly discuss, question, and re-imagine the delivered reports, with the objective of better meeting their institutional, departmental, staffing, and collection needs. Using an informal meeting format, many questions were asked to the libraries: Which reports are you using? What are they used for? Is there anything about the reports that requires clarification? How would you like to see each report improved? Are there metrics you would like to see captured in a new report? Each college representative had opportunities to communicate their feedback and experiences with the delivered reports, and, as a group, the feedback was shared and collectively discussed. It was discovered that some reports were not understood, many reports could be better formatted and include additional transaction data, and that some reports were not used at all. This communal and collective process also proved valuable to individual libraries through sharing best practices, and learning how other libraries are streamlining workflow and using statistics to demonstrate value.
 
The group has met twice since mid-January to discuss the report processes and outputs, and is now in the process of creating a project charter to outline the scope, timelines, and deliverables of this exciting project.
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