The Ontario Council of University Libraries’ (OCUL) shared academic search tool, Omni will soon be available to even more of the province’s students, faculty and researchers. McMaster University and OCAD University are set to launch Omni in summer 2022 and will join 16 Ontario universities currently providing access to more than 60,000,000 electronic and physical resources through the shared tool. OCAD University and McMaster University will be adding their materials and expertise to this province-wide network, further expanding this vast collection and strengthening support for Ontario’s academic community. 

Omni is the result of a collaboration led by the Ontario Council of University Libraries. It is powered by a collaborative system of team members and resources from OCUL member libraries. Omni users experience fast and easy access to a collection of diverse, high quality, academic material to support their learning, teaching and research needs.  Staff from across the partner libraries work together to ensure access to numerous academic and scholarly resources, leveraging broad content coverage, deep expertise, and extensive metadata. 

Omni is an outcome of OCUL’s Collaborative Futures initiative, designed to enhance and deepen the existing partnership of Ontario’s university libraries. It is based on a distributed and shared collaborative approach to print and electronic/digital resource management and builds on existing OCUL-wide collaborative initiatives such as Scholars Portal technology and collaborative licensing.  

“We are excited to welcome both OCAD University and McMaster University as partners in the Omni service” says Michael Vandenburg, OCUL Interim Executive Director. “Omni provides Ontario university faculty and students with a powerful tool for finding and accessing academic collections across the province and will serve as a platform for additional collaborative initiatives by our member libraries in service of user needs.” 

First launched in February 2019 the Omni partnership has grown year by year to include the following OCUL member institutions: 

• Algoma University 
• Brock University 
• Carleton University 
• University of Guelph 
• Lakehead University 
• Laurentian University 
• McMaster University 
• Nipissing University 
• OCAD University 
• University of Ontario Institute of Technology 
• University of Ottawa 
• Queen’s University  
• Trent University 
• University of Waterloo 
• Western University 
• Wilfrid Laurier University 
• University of Windsor 
• York University 

Omni is based on Ex Libris’s Alma library software system and Primo VE discovery system.   

For more information about Omni, visit: https://ocul.on.ca/omni  

Read McMaster University announcement
Read OCAD University announcement