Through a year of uncertainty and unexpected disruptions to in-person services, BC ELN bolstered partner libraries and their communities. Read our annual report, Innovation & Success 2020, to learn how BC ELN collaborations ensured students, educators, and researchers received - and continue to receive - critical learning assistance through the pandemic.

B.C. post-secondary institutions can now host student, faculty, or staff-led open journals at no cost for a pilot period on BC ELN’s instance of Open Journal Systems (OJS). This is a fantastic opportunity for medium and smaller institutions that may lack the technical infrastructure or software expertise to test the waters of open access publishing in a fully supported environment.

Launched as a pilot program earlier this year, BC ELN will use this free journal hosting period to assess partner libraries’ needs in terms of support, customization, and staff time required for coordination, in order to determine a reasonable cost structure for an official consortial service.

Starting as a “seed” idea discussed by the BC ELN Steering Committee several years ago, momentum grew when a number of partner libraries showed interest via survey in a consortial publishing service. Public Knowledge Project (PKP) – the creators of OJS, an open source software application for managing and publishing scholarly journals – expressed support for the idea, and BC ELN built a test instance of the OJS software. BC ELN launched its pilot program earlier this spring, and two institutions have begun building their open journals, with more planning to join soon.

BC ELN has since been exploring a partnership with the University of Alberta Library’s publishing program, which would provide hosting and software support for the project.

Modeled after Arca’s collaborative digital repository service, where BC ELN provides low-cost hosting and technical support for institutional digital collections, the consortial open publishing service will provide economies of scale and enable institutions to participate in a growing area of open access publishing that might not otherwise be available to them.

There is space for more institutions to join the pilot and trial open journal publishing. Contact Brandon Weigel (brandonw@bceln.ca) for more information.

The Arca Admin Centre has been hard at work developing a plan for restructuring Arca when the service migrates to Islandora 8. The new structure will maintain the current economies of scale and parent-child concept that make Arca successful, but will set up each Arca site (or multi-site) on its own server. This will allow Arca to deploy new sites more easily, eliminate errors in one site affecting others, and most importantly will increase performance. The plan was reviewed by the Arca Advisory Committee this spring. There is much more work to be done in this major migration project, but a first step is now complete!

Students have had access to AskAway during exams, the semester break, and into the beginning of summer courses, as partner libraries decided to extend service through to May 14th. There is still one week to go... Download Instagram or Twitter graphics and tell your students: AskAway is open Monday to Friday, 9 am - 5 pm.

Did you know: Visibility of AskAway in key online locations is the primary determinant in how much the service is used. To support institutions providing their students with readily available, point-of-need chat help, the Admin Centre has launched a series called "Visibility Tip of the Month". Check out all Visibility Tips.

Staff and patrons across B.C. will experience improved search and requesting through Illume, thanks to the Union Database Cleanup project, currently wrapping up. The project involved cleaning up outdated Illume records by removing low-use union database targets and approximately a million records with erroneous or incomplete information.

The Illume support centre will be providing live online staff education sessions to academic library staff implementing the recently launched Best Practices for Academic SHAREit libraries. These sessions aim to promote the health and fairness of the BC library resource sharing system, and support the elimination of ILL fees. Opportunities to sign up coming!

Cross-consortial collaboration for the win! BC ELN has worked jointly with several consortia to negotiate three new resources, now available to BC ELN partner libraries: Harvard Business Publishing Student Success Package, Historical Newspapers of British Columbia, and RDA Toolkit. These 3 new titles add to the nearly 50% of resources BC ELN negotiates in partnership with other consortia.

Get ready to share your opinions: BC ELN has launched its Resource Forum for partner library staff to nominate electronic resources for licensing consideration. Start by checking out our FAQs. Note that to nominate a resource, staff must have an account. Contact the BC ELN Office if you need assistance.

WriteAway expands again and welcomes Northern Lights College to the service! The Admin Centre has onboarded this 19^th WriteAway institution, and as of February, NLC students have been able to upload papers for tutor feedback.

The WriteAway Admin Centre is committed to contributing to the tutoring community of practice by sharing insights and best practices. This spring the Admin Centre facilitated a tutor round-table meeting focusing on student-centred responses.