BC ELN Receives Funding to Bolster Services and Remove Barriers

BC ELN will receive $110,000 in one-time funding from the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills to investigate information needs of Indigenous students and potential barriers to BC ELN membership for Indigenous post-secondary institutions, with a goal of developing recommendations for removing these barriers. A portion of the funding will be dedicated to bolstering AskAway and WriteAway services over the next two years, focusing on enhancing service models and addressing barriers to participation, particularly for Indigenous post-secondary institutions. Read more.

Innovation & Success 2023 Report Released

BC ELN is proud to share its Innovation & Success 2023 report, which captures shared achievements by our partner libraries.

Highlights include:

• saving the post-secondary sector $11.5 million through core services;
• licensing 1,050 products collaboratively to enable affordable access to resources;
• filling 82,000 Illume Interlibrary Loan requests;
• witnessing AskAway's second-highest usage year;
• celebrating WriteAway's 10th anniversary; and
• expanding Arca to 30 sites with close to a quarter-million digital assets available on the platform.

An accessible version and past reports are also available on our Innovation & Success page.

Bursary Supports BC ELN Staff LLEAD Learning

Reba Ouimet, BC ELN Licensing Coordinator, is taking part in this year's LLEAD Program, thanks to a generous EBSCO Bursary. LLEAD stands out as the only leadership and management development program catering to individuals across academic, public, and enterprise libraries, as well as in information services. The EBSCO Bursary provides financial support for library staff members to engage in LLEAD. Reba is privileged to be selected for this support, which contributes significantly to her ongoing professional growth. Read more about Reba's LLEAD experience.

Arca Digital Repository

Thanks to $500,000 in funding support from the Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills, Arca is currently focused on transitioning to a new Islandora 2 platform to improve the overall experience for both member sites and visitors exploring collections. BC ELN hired an Arca Migration Specialist in January who is helping coordinate efforts to standardize metadata across member sites. Here's a summary of our progress:

We've developed a dedicated new website to document Arca's transition to the Islandora 2 environment. The site is being used to outline steps for member sites to prepare for migration.

Migration work is underway in collaboration with discoverygarden. Arca staff participate in weekly meetings with a project manager, finalizing the planning phase to guide the migration process effectively.

A new scalable, and sustainable, agreement has been established with SFU’s Cloud Services team, ensuring Arca has the necessary infrastructure for its long-term operations.

Arca Partnerships

The BC ELN-BCHDP Support Service helped 13 sites with their BCHDP applications for the 2024/25 funding cycle, which closed in early December. Out of these 13 sites, 6 completed and submitted final applications, ALL of which were successfully awarded grant funding by the adjudication committee! Visit the BCHDP 2024 Projects page to see the full list of grantees.

All 6 sites will be integrating their collections into the BCHDP Arca site at no cost through the BCHDP Arca Hosting Service. This marks the largest influx of collections into the site within a single program year.     

The Support team is currently working to refresh the service website in preparation for the 2025/26 cycle. The team is looking forward to supporting a new slate of prospective BCHDP applicants once the Early Notice Survey opens in July 2024. In the meantime, support inquiries are welcome at digisupport@bceln.ca.

The Arca Administrative Centre assisted Kaatza Station Museum and Archives with upload of their B.C./Western Canadian Lumber Worker Newspaper Collection into Arca, which is now available for viewing. Vancouver Police Museum and Archives' John Vance Fonds will also soon be made available on the site, bringing BCHDP Arca Hosting Service activities for the 2023/24 cycle to a close.

AskAway Chat Research Help

2023 was the second busiest year on record for AskAway after 2020. Thanks go to the Ministry for their funding support, which helped us add extra BC ELN shifts to the schedule to meet demand. Several libraries also stepped up and took on extra shifts during October and November when things got hectic. Huge thanks to our partners for chipping in!

The AskAway Advisory Committee welcomed some fresh faces on October 1st while bidding farewell to those whose term was coming to an end. Gratitude goes to new, returning, and outgoing members for your contributions! Find your institution's committee rep on the AskAway Advisory Committee page.

We had a great turnout at our lunch and learn session in December where over 30 service providers got together to chat about some findings from a recently published article titled "Chat Transcripts in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis of Chats from the AskAway Consortia."

Illume Resource Sharing

OpenILL is now available in Illume! Patrons can now submit pre-populated ILL requests directly from external third-party vendors (eg. EBSCO) or library web forms. This new feature can help students quickly and easily submit Non-returnable (Copy) requests from discovery layers such as EDS and database resources. Group training will be available in the spring or contact Illume Support to set-up this feature!

The Illume Support Centre works on behalf of libraries by collecting software improvement suggestions and system feedback, sharing them with the SHAREit software vendor Auto-Graphics, and liaising throughout the development process. Over 15 of our feature recommendations have been approved in recent years, including Illume members’ 2023 suggestion for an Invoice Sent and Paid status workflow, and the 2024 improvement suggestion for the Lending Policy to have both Loan and Copy request type options for each Format. To learn more about top-voted enhancements, visit our SHAREit Enhancements and Improvements page.

Licensing

BC ELN has been working with other Consortia Canada members to streamline license agreement terms for ConsortiaManager, the consortial invoicing platform used by 11 consortia across the country. We successfully negotiated prorated extensions on the current pricing model, aligning everything neatly with a common renewal date of September 1.

The updated BC ELN Model License is now available, along with a handy overview document breaking down each section. Partners are welcome to use and adapt the Model License for their own direct deals with vendors. A new BC ELN Streaming Media Model License has also been posted for member use, along with accompanying overview documentation.

BC ELN has teamed up with EBSCO Academic and EBSCO Health to streamline member feedback, provide additional support, and post relevant information on the new EBSCOHost and EDS User Interface (ongoing). Feedback can be emailed no later than April 10th to BC ELN Licensing Coordinator Reba Ouimet.

WriteAway Online Writing Support

WriteAway has welcomed new folks and new institutions... In early 2024, BC ELN hired a WriteAway Coordinator to manage the Administrative Centre, and Okanagan College has joined as WriteAway’s newest participating institution. Welcome aboard everyone!

Participating members celebrated WriteAway’s 10^th anniversary in November with party packs and celebratory events held at individual institutions. This is a significant milestone for our service which has grown from 6 to 20 institutions over the past decade. Download our WriteAway timeline and celebration poster.

The WriteAway Advisory Committee saw a few shifts in October as terms ended and new ones began. As Always, thanks go to committee members – past and present – for their work on this committee. You can find your institution’s rep on the WriteAway Advisory Committee page.