Initiatives
Collective ingenuity as a driving force.
By combining the strengths and resources of its members, the PBUQ gives momentum to promising initiatives and promotes innovation for the benefit of all university libraries in Quebec.
The PBUQ actively supports open science and research by providing communities with information resources and specialized tools that contribute to open access, sharing, and reuse of knowledge.
It promotes scholarly communication in French through its participation in the Circé Network, a Quebec network dedicated to creating shared services for scientific journals, which relies on the Open Journal Systems (OJS) software.
It contributes to the development of Scholaris, a platform that centrally hosts and manages some of its members’ institutional repositories. Available in open access are theses, dissertations, and research outputs produced within the university community.
It supports the dissemination of science through Borealis, a shared platform for research data.
It also provides expanded access to geospatial data and aerial photographs through the Géoindex platform and its Géophoto module.
Finally, the PBUQ facilitates access to digital data and its use (orthophotography and digital stereo models) through agreements with the Montreal Metropolitan Community (MMC), Quebec’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Forests (MRNF) and soon the City of Sherbrooke. It also contributes to the showcasing of documentary heritage by digitizing aerial photography collections from the MRNF and National Library and Archives of Quebec (BAnQ), integrated into the Géophoto module of the Géoindex platform and made accessible to Quebec’s university community.
The PBUQ is committed to facilitating open access to educational resources, notably through the PressBooks project for open-access textbook publishing.
It also supports student success and quality learning through complementary initiatives, such as the creation of the Working Group on Combating Misinformation (Groupe de travail Lutte contre la désinformation et la mésinformation – GT-LDM).
To facilitate access to knowledge, improve its discoverability, and ensure its long-term preservation, the PBUQ offers a shared services platform (PPS) and pools powerful tools:
- WMS (integrated collection management)
- Sofia (a bilingual discovery tool giving access to more than 20 million documents)
- Tipasa (interlibrary loan within Quebec and internationally)
- Third Iron (streamlined access to full-text articles from periodicals)
- These tools also enable enhanced services, such as online payment and interlibrary loans (ILL).
The Répertoire de vedettes-matière (RVM), created and maintained by Université Laval Library, improves the discoverability of French-language content.
A shared preservation protocol optimizes the long-term preservation of print documents, while reducing unnecessary duplication and freeing up shelf space, in support of sustainable and equitable access to knowledge.
Finally, the PBUQ supports a range of structuring actions around decolonization and has set up an ad hoc group on access to print materials to address issues linked to the diversity of user profiles.
The shared purchasing program enables Quebec’s university libraries to expand access to digital resources and strengthen their collective power.
Led by the PBUQ, which coordinates negotiations, licence management, and content sharing, this collaborative model made it possible to collectively negotiate nearly $15 million in digital resources in 2020–2021, generating $3.5 million in savings for libraries.
More equitable, more coherent, and more strategic, this approach maximizes the benefits for each institution, strengthens the academic information autonomy of Quebec’s university sector, and tangibly broadens the horizon of knowledge accessible to all.
The PBUQ is developing interactive dashboards (Power BI) to support evidence-based decision-making in university libraries.
These tools make it possible to visualize key indicators – loans, acquisitions, attendance – and to track usage trends across the province.
By facilitating strategic analysis, the dashboards strengthen team autonomy and enhance the ability to demonstrate service impact. A link to the dashboards will be available soon.