wikipedia logo

ODW Wikipedia Project Page

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:

  • check and improve citations on already existing articles
  • connect orphan articles to related Wikipedia articles
  • edit existing Wikipedia articles
  • upload new Wikipedia articles

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

Mystery Month: The Bell and Sloman Families

A few years, Rick Bell donated to Brock University a trove of photographs found in his mother’s house in St Catharines. While many of the later photos are of his family members, there are a number of late 19th century studio portraits depicting unidentified people. We wrote about these mysteries in our virtual exhibit about black history in Ontario:

 

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Continue reading Mystery Month: The Bell and Sloman Families

April is #MysteryMonth!

All month long, we’ll be sharing Mystery items from our VITA members’ collections. A mystery item is any record tagged with a question – often a request to help organizations complete their metadata about a piece of local history.

Our count of mystery items in VITA collections right now is over 11,000. That’s a lot of unsolved mysteries!

Often we’re looking to identify people in photographs, or get a more accurate idea of when a picture was taken. Occasionally we want to know who made an object in our collections. Sometimes we need help figuring out what handwriting means, or knowing more about the long-term history of a business or group.

And sometimes we just want to know – What the heck is this thing?

HSM124433f.jpg
“Unnamed object circa 1900,” from the Huron Shores Museum collection.

Continue reading April is #MysteryMonth!