Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Revising COPPUL's Strategic Plan

The COPPUL Directors will be meeting in person on September 17-19 to revise COPPUL's strategic plan. All working groups have been invited to contribute to the revision.

This is a general invitation to all staff at member institutions to participate in the process. If you are not currently in one of the working groups and would like to suggest initiatives to include in the new plan, please send your comments to Sandy Slade at coppul@royalroads.ca by Friday, September 7.

The current COPPUL Strategic Plan can be viewed at http://www.coppul.ca/keydocs/strategy.html

ANTS News

Two new tutorials have been added to the ANimated Tutorial Sharing (ANTS) Project - http://www.brandonu.ca/library/coppul/ - which contains Open Source Tutorials for other libraries to access, modify and use.

The new tutorials are:
* Modern Language Association (EBSCOhost) Tutorial - added June 2007.
* CINAHL (EBSCOhost) Tutorial - added August 2007.

This brings the total number of tutorials in ANTS to 12.

In other news, ANTS has been gaining international attention. It has been bookmarked in several social bookmarking sites and mentioned in documents and presentations from Finland and Italy, and a blog from France. Two international volunteers have agreed to contribute tutorials to the ANTS project. They are Virginia Bender, West Virginia University, who volunteered to do two Medline tutorials, and Ann Tenglund, St. Bonaventure University, NY, who volunteered to do an English version of the tutorial for the Academic Search Premier database.

Carmen Kazakoff Lane, Brandon University, did a presentation on ANTS at the ACRL Conference held March 29 - April 1, 2007 in Baltimore. Her peer-reviewed contributed paper "Providing Innovative Services to 'Our Users' in the World of Web 2.0: The ANTS Initiative." was published in the Conference Proceedings.

For more information on the ANTS Project, contact Carmen at kazakoff@brandonu.ca

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Books 24x7

COPPUL added Books 24x7 to its list of subscriptions on August 1st. The recent offer resulted in seven libraries upgrading their subscriptions to join the COPPUL agreement and five new subscribers.

Books 24x7 has extended its offer to the end of September due to the positive response from COPPUL members. Libraries can join the license until then and have their subscriptions prorated to either start on September 1st or October 1st, expiring July 31, 2008. The Books 24x7 trial account has been reactivated until August 31st.

For more information about this offer, contact Debbie Braun debbie.braun@accesscomm.ca