OCLS purchased the McNabb Connolly collection in March 2014 for the Ontario colleges as part of a study case for exploring the opportunities and challenges of linking directly to digital assets through Collect. The study was a success, further demonstrating the value of developing a shared repository of digital assets for Ontario’s 24 Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology.
Five years of hosting was included in the original purchase, which came to expire at the end of March 2019. Colleges had 3 options for continued access to their subscribed content:
- pay an ongoing hosting fee for access on the vendor's platform;
- subscribe or purchase new content from the vendor and thereby have their hosting fee waived (colleges who had already acquired new content in the previous two years were automatically counted in this group);
- take the raw content files and host them elsewhere.
The McNabb Connolly collection covers a range of subjects, including health, sciences, and environmental studies, and contains several Canadian productions and a number of French-language films. The collection contains a total of 79 streaming videos (42 titles) that have unlimited, concurrent user access. RDA compliant MARC21 records are available, and the majority of the collection is closed captioned with the remaining videos offering subtitles.
For more information, please see the McNabb Connolly Streaming Video resource page in ERMA.