As the end of the year approaches, we want to thank you for being a part of the OCUL and Scholars Portal community.
Because of your support, in 2024 we celebrated some exciting developments and milestones:
- It’s Omni’s five-year anniversary! More than 1.5 million requests have been fulfilled through Omni and the province-wide collection has nearly 26 million resources to discover.
- Toronto Metropolitan University launched Omni in 2024, becoming the 19th partner library in Ontario to implement the academic search tool.
- Three schools went live with Scholaris, the new national shared institutional repository service.
- The AI and Machine Learning Program launched, focused on five exploratory projects designed to create reusable tools and techniques that can be adapted for future use.
- RACER was officially sunset after serving as the backbone of our interlibrary loan system for 20+ years. Alma is now the core software of our resource sharing.
- This year is the ten-year anniversary of OJS at Scholars Portal. We host OJS instances for 14 OCUL members with a total of 210 journals and over 61,000 articles, all available Open Access.
- Scholars Portal launched the OLRC Tape Backup Pilot. This new initiative helps mitigate risk to digital assets stored in the OLRC through geographic and technological diversity.
- Two new Permafrost tools – the revised makeCSV tool and the Normalization Report Downloader – were released this year to help streamline preservation workflows.
- The GeoPortal Redevelopment Working Group was formed, and the project team began developing front and back-end prototype test environments for the new GeoPortal.
- The redesigned OCUL website went online in the fall, coinciding with the implementation of ConsortiaManager as the management tool for consortial e-resource licenses.
- Jacqueline Whyte Appleby and Harpinder Singh were named Associate Directors at Scholars Portal.
You can read about these highlights and more in our Scholars Portal and OCUL annual reports. And don’t forget to check out Scholars Portal’s Top Hits of 2024 to see which books, journals and datasets were most popular this year.
Looking ahead to 2025, OCUL and Scholars Portal plan to:
- Launch a new strategic plan, mapping our priorities for the next four years.
- Bring back the Learn with Scholars Portal series, starting with our first webinar about Zotero on February 6 at 11 a.m. EST. Registration to come in early January.
- Release a refreshed Data Explorer tool for Odesi and Borealis that will better support data visualization, analysis, and curation.
- Further develop the Alma-to-Alma network to increase resource sharing among Omni libraries and Canadian institutions.
- Continue working on the GeoPortal Redevelopment Project. A beta release of the new GeoPortal is anticipated for fall 2025.
- Continue working with Scholaris Early Adopter institutions with production sites for upwards of 15 schools expected to go live in 2025.
- Gather virtually for Scholars Portal Days and the Collaborative Futures Mini Conference in spring/summer 2025.
Our offices will be closed for the winter break: OCUL – December 23-January 1; Scholars Portal – December 24-January 5.
We wish you a happy, healthy holiday season and look forward to all that the new year will bring!