As part of our Strategy to develop “The Right Information Technology Tools”, and led by Suliang Feng, our Manager of Virtual Services, the MPL Virtual Branch continues to expand. Recent progress includes:
Virtual Branch Expansion: Over the last 6 months, through expansion of the Virtual Branch, we have added 188,243 unique e-books and 11,699 unique e-journals to our virtual collection. This, along with our Federated Search tool, enhances access to the “long tail” of online information, and expands our collections to a size and depth far beyond what would ever be possible to contain in our bricks-and-mortar branches. In effect, this strategy will provide Markham residents with 24x7 access to resources equivalent to those held by the great research and academic libraries of the world.
Overdrive: As announced by Suliang earlier today, the soft launch of Overdrive (downloadable audiobooks, e-books, movies) took place this morning.
New Business Resources: Reference Canada (an excellent resource for small business and job search) and OneSource (a world-wide business information resource centre) will launch this week.
Staff Training: Intensive staff training on Federated Search, OverDrive, Reference Canada and OneSource has taken place to ensure staff are prepared to support customer access to these new resources.
Website Improvements: Staff met with ITS to discuss this project in the context of the Town/Region portal project, which will ultimately encompass a redesign of the MPL website, along with the websites of all Town business units. The first phase of the portal is expected to go live in late 2009, which means that a full redesign of the MPL website is not currently warranted. As an interim measure, we will work with our ITS client advisor to give our website a facelift, improving its look and functionality.
For more information on the portal project, please see the Council Report at
http://www.markham.ca/markham/ccbs/DocExtract2.asp?Document=cl081014-006c-0005.htm&vpath=/markham/ccbs/indexfile/index/council/cl081014-006c-0005.htm
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