Farewell to Summer!
We hope you’ve had a wonderful few months to relax and take a break from the hustle and bustle. We’re gearing up for a busy season and looking forward to everything this autumn will bring!
This Quarterly shares some exciting news: upcoming collaborations, digital collection highlights, VITA Toolkit upgrades, conferences and save-the-dates.
Read the full newsletter here.
Painting by George Wolfe courtesy of Thames Art Gallery Permanent Collection
Thanks to practicum student Jamie Morin, we have a GLAM/ODW Wiki project page underway. The WikiProject will act as ODW’s central location on Wikipedia and was developed to build ODW’s authority as an author in the Wikisphere and provide an infrastructure to launch more projects and expand existing sections as needed.
For the launch, we have included one project: Ontario Community Newspapers. This project links in all articles about newspaper publications already created and published on Wikipedia by ODW staff and volunteers. The project invites volunteers to:
We invite our VITA partners and the wider community to participate in growing this project and building a strong web of information around Ontario Community Newspapers with links back to online digital newspaper collections.
Visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/OurDigitalWorld
We’re so excited to present to you our very first Year In Review!
Every year our team and our members accomplish wonderful things, and we want to celebrate our work and theirs. Please take a moment to look back on 2018 with us and read about what we’ve done – and what we’re working on for 2019. Continue reading OurDigitalWorld’s 2018 Year In Review
Just a reminder of all the ways to find us at the OLA SuperConference in Toronto tomorrow:
Our best wishes for health and happiness in the new year!
The ODW offices will be closed from December 24th to January 2nd. We look forward to working with you in 2019!
Our INK and GovDocs collections will be unavailable until December 26th for planned downtime over the holidays. Many newspapers will still be available at search.ourontario.ca and many government documents will still be available on the Internet Archive at archive.org/details/governmentpublications.
Our best wishes for the holidays and the coming year. We’ve got some exciting projects in store for 2018 and can’t wait to share them with you!
Our offices will be closed from December 22nd until January 4th. You can email any of our staff during that time, and someone will get back to you as soon as they can. Have safe and happy holidays!
Matt Barry, our Digital Library Developer, has been working with Dan Sifton on the Provincial Digital Library Project, a collaboration between OurDigitalWorld and the British Columbia Library Association.
Continue reading An interview with Matt Barry, our Digital Library Developer
We love it when people get excited about the tools and services we’ve built. So much that we just have to share it. Last week, the bloggers at Genealogy Canada included us in their week in review, and they had lovely things to say:
Have you ever gone to the site OurDigitalWorld?
There are many older newspapers online that you should be aware of, and they are searchable. On their website, they say that they have the “Largest collection of Ontario Community Newspapers online, from 1810 to present day”.
This month they have put on a complete set of newspapers from Clarington, Ontario which now joins 150,000 pages from Orono, Bowmanville!
And coming soon there will be more Kawartha Lakes 150,000 pages from Lindsay to Bobcaygeon and Omemee!
This is a fantastic place to go to when you need to read about your ancestor’s lives in the villages and towns in Ontario.
A big thank-you goes to Susanna Galbraith and the Open Shelf team for interviewing Loren and Jess about our work at OurDigitalWorld.
SG: What are a few of the greatest challenges libraries and archives face when creating open heritage collections?
LF & JP: When it comes to community history, we all want to tell a story. How we tell that story — and how we capture it — happens in many different ways. The biggest challenge we see is that it’s difficult to find standards and tools that everyone will want to adopt for individual storytelling projects without feeling as though they are “flattening” everyone’s experience. On the other hand, we also see how social tagging and highly customized tools can dilute the strength of good metadata and sharing information. Striking a balance is a big learning curve.
You can read the whole interview at http://www.open-shelf.ca/150601-digital-world/.
The American Archivist, the flagship publication of the Society of American Archivists, reviewed OurDigitalWorld and its VITA toolkit:
Continue reading ODW gets reviewed in The American Archivist!
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