We are a not-for-profit that is dedicated to providing an innovative and sustainable digital platform for community collections. We provide tools and services built upon collaboration and the belief that discovery and access to community content and our shared cultural assets are the foundation of identifying and enriching a community’s sense of identity.
As part of cultural stewardship – our challenge is to be encourage and enable more grassroots, more diverse and more inclusive participation.
As part of digital stewardship – our challenge is to assist communities with best practices and toolsets to create open, reusable and interoperable data that can be easily shared across systems and optimized for discovery.
Guiding Principles
Access
We are committed to expanding the community of digital content contributors and to ensuring that our shared digital history is discoverable and searchable by users in an evolving sustainable web environment that everyone can be a part of.
Collaboration
We are a collaborative initiative with wide-ranging partnerships involving all of the cultural heritage sector — libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other community groups who create and/or manage cultural content. An essential component of our work is encouraging collaboration within and between regional, national, and international networks so that resources can be discovered and delivered to a growing number of users.
Standards
Standards are integral to manage information and to present data in a consistent and meaningful way. Standards are also essential in allowing for integrated access to and searching of a wide range of resources across different systems. It’s important that the metadata that allows for the discovery, searching, delivery, presentation and exchange of our digital resources be robust and reusable. This ensures a flexible and adaptable behind-the-scenes model for integrating data across networks and for guaranteeing sustainability.
Multi-faceted participation
We are committed to ensuring that all content organizations have an opportunity to participate, no matter the size or type of institution. It is about levelling the playing field by providing the tools and other support services that will allow content providers with limited resources the ability to be a participant in this global venture. For the ODW team, it’s about working with the community of contributors to enable digital content to be searchable and discoverable by end-users.
User-centred
User-centred discovery and engagement is the benchmark for delivery of our services to end-users.