Thursday, May 29

Re-Scoping the ACE Service Calls
Lisl Schoner-Saunders (Algoma University); Lauren Rupert (OCLS)

The ACE Service Group has been working hard to redefine the function and focus of the group. With the call for chairs came a need and opportunity to reorient the calls from exclusively Scholars Portal updates to include more active participation from members and actionable items from the group. This update will include:
1. Communication strategies such as community survey, new SpotDocs space, new listserv
2. Creating a new ToR and defining a new purpose for the group
3. Engaging our OCLS college members
4. Call for members and a chair

Sustainable Accessibility: Developing Expertise in Remediation for Alternate Formats
Carli Agostino (Carleton University)

Over the past three years, our institution has invested in training and development to build the internal capacity and expertise needed to provide remediated readings for blind and visually impaired students. This lightning talk will showcase our journey and the successful completion of our first academic year offering this enhanced alternate format service.

In alignment with the theme of building with intention and for sustainability, the talk will explore how this work can help guide the evolution of the ACE service as it seeks to improve the accessibility of scans and integrate artificial intelligence into its workflows. The remediated content also has broader value for the OCUL community, with potential for sharing through the ACE service or the EMMA repository.

Overall, this talk will illustrate how intentional investment in people, processes, and partnerships can strengthen shared infrastructure, uphold core values like accessibility and sustainability, and build long-term capacity across the OCUL community.

Collaborative Collecting: Better Together
Janice Adlington (McMaster Univesity); Alicia Zorzetto (Brock University); Lisl Schoner-Saunders (Algoma University); Christa Foley (OCUL)

Seven minutes, six recommendations! In March 2025, the Collective Collecting Working Group, a subgroup of OCUL-IR, delivered a report to OCUL outlining six recommendations for ways schools could work together to share and enhance collections. This lightning talk presents the proposed directions, outlines needed analyses, and suggests possible next steps for intentionally building shared collections. Spoiler for Scholars Portal: recommendation #2 calls for the exploration of e-book ILL from the SP platform.

Enhancing user access to library services and resources: Insights from LibKey Nomad ++ module
Cameron Wheaton and Wei Zhang (McMaster University)

McMaster University Libraries has recently subscribed to the Third Iron Complete package through OCUL, which includes a series of tools including the LibKey Nomad browser extension. After negotiating with Third Iron, we have been permitted to freely trial a new (paid) add-on called "LibKey Nomad ++" that has the potential to further improve user access to McMaster Libraries and Scholars Portal services. Cameron and Wei will spend their time discussing two aspects of interest: embedding SP's Ask A Librarian service into the browser extension, and targeted use of domain messaging feature to promote library services and share resources such as LibGuides and Read & Publish agreements with McMaster users.

Creative Uses of the Borealis API
Tim Ribaric (Brock University) 

The great thing about Borealis is that it is built on top of a full function API. This means that you can interact with it using things like Python to create custom curation or analysis tasks. This talk will demonstrate this idea in action. It will examine how you can use a platform like Google Colab to design interactive notebooks to do these tasks and end with a call for ideas on how else we can use this paradigm in our work with the platform.

Friday, May 30

Preservation in the Age of Precarity
Steve Marks (University of Toronto)

In the face of economic, political, and environmental uncertainty, libraies' responsibilities for the preservation of information feels more pressing than ever. Yet, many of the things we have relied on to fulfill our preservation mandates are the very things being threatened. How do we and the repositories we use (including the SP TDR, Borealis, and Permafrost) evolve to survive this new age of precarity?

Bridge Builders: Foundations for Sustainable DSpace Migrations
Manfred Raffelsieper, Jennifer Whitney, and Kevin Bowrin (Carleton University)

This session explores the early development of a flexible and sustainable foundation for migrating content into DSpace. As institutions face evolving needs around digital preservation and platform transitions, having robust infrastructure to support these migrations is essential.

At the heart of this work is a reusable API session class designed to simplify and streamline interaction with the DSpace REST API. By handling the complexities of authentication, token management, and request handling, it allows teams to focus on the data itself rather than the mechanics of integration.

The goal is to offer a starting point — a foundational piece of infrastructure — that can be adapted to a variety of migration scenarios. Whether you're moving a single repository or developing an ongoing pipeline, this approach supports long-term flexibility and maintainability in service of evolving institutional needs.

Pairing OLRC with Containers for Low-Cost Computing
Art Rhyno (University of Windsor)

In 2011, the provincial government cancelled funding for the Knowledge Ontario project, which was a multisector initiative coordinated by the Ontario Library Association. One of the subprojects, OurOntario, continued as a standalone non-profit called OurDigitalWorld and inherited a large newspaper project that was housed at the University of Toronto. The newspaper collection went offline in 2024 when the original server could no longer meet security requirements. This lightning talk gives an overview of the attempt to leverage container computing and web storage to bring back the newspaper project with minimal resources.

Using AI Tools to Assist Digital Preservation Workflows
Guanwen Zhang, Kenton Good, and Sharon Farnel (University of Alberta)

In this lightning talk, we would like to demonstrate how to ask Gemini to write a customized Python program so that we can use it to process the source digital items, extract relavant data files, add necessary metadata files to each item, check file integrity belonging to each item, and create a hierachical target structures for each digital item. The resulting organized digital items are ready for digital preservation with Archivematica in next step.

The Canadian Data Rescue Project
Kristi Thompson (Western University); Alexandra Cooper (Queen's University)

Recent executive orders and funding cuts in the United States have lead to mass deletion of data from government sites. It also has led to mass resistance in the form of library, data, government and RDM people working to download and steward this material safely before it disappears permanently. One major effort is the Data Rescue Project.

Canada has its own concerns with government data loss. Data is published on the Open Government Portal, but often this data is not properly stewarded and may be missing documentation, and older data may not be added to the portal at all. For years small groups have collaborated to rescue datasets that had become unusable. In February 2025, we created the Canadian Data Rescue Project, inspired by our American counterpart, to both increase efforts at stewarding Canadian data and offer assistance to our American colleagues in this moment of crisis.