Welcome the Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation to VITA

chpf003608618One of our newest VITA agencies is the Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation, a charitable organization created to honour the legacy of George Hunter.

The CHPF has spent the summer digitizing the George Hunter collection and are now uploading batches to their new VITA Toolkit site, thanks to a DHCP grant and several summer student funded positions.

When George Hunter founded CHPF in 2001, he and his colleagues had a mandate to preserve the great works of Canada’s photographers for the future. Building upon that legacy, CHPF uses contemporary archiving best practices along with current-day technology to digitize, preserve, and display these images through our website, social media and the VITA Digital Toolkit to share these amazing images of Canada to anyone interested in viewing history from this unique perspective.   

– Nicole Plaskett, CHPF Foundation Administrator

You can check out some sneak peeks at the collection on the Foundation’s blog and take a look at the first 500 items uploaded to VITA for today, World Digital Preservation Day!

 

Nicole Plaskett, the Foundation Administrator, answered a few of our questions about why they chose VITA and where the project is heading:

Continue reading Welcome the Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation to VITA

Welcome the Cobourg Museum Foundation to VITA!

logoWe are excited to welcome new VITA members the Cobourg Museum Foundation. Thanks to summer student funding, they have begun to populate their VITA collection with past years’ exhibit panels, photographs of artifacts, and metadata to help you learn more about Cobourg’s prominent people.

The Cobourg Museum Foundation has just released its new VITA website, making available to the public, for the first time in a searchable way, its growing collection of almost four hundred story panels and many of its collection of artifacts.

During the summer, two students were kept busy uploading the material into the VITA platform which is specifically designed for not-for-profit organizations to upload, describe and display their digital collections. It is the same platform as used by many institutions throughout the country, including the Cobourg Public Library (for its Cobourg and District Images) and Brighton Digital Archives.

The story panels, which have been the basis of the annual exhibits at the Sifton-Cook Heritage Centre, had previously been uploaded to the CMF website. They were viewable there but not searchable. Now significant words from all panels can be found through a simple search engine on the new VITA website.

You can find their press release here. We asked a few questions of Stanley Isherwood, Cobourg Museum Foundation treasurer, about the project:

Continue reading Welcome the Cobourg Museum Foundation to VITA!

Grimsby Public Library’s digitization of the Grimsby Independent is complete

Three co-op students, a handful of volunteers, 10,000 pages spanning 64 years, and about 500 hours of labour later and the Grimsby Public Library has a reason to celebrate.

We’re delighted to see VITA member Grimsby Public Library receive some much-deserved attention for their digitization of the Grimsby Independent. You can see the completed project on their VITA site, along with index records of other papers.

There’s also a party today! From 4:30pm to 5:30pm at the Grimsby Public Library, there will be both cake and history!

Continue reading Grimsby Public Library’s digitization of the Grimsby Independent is complete

Congratulations to the recipients of the Documentary Heritage Communities Program grants

Congratulations to our two VITA member organizations who have received grants through the Library and Archives Canada DHCP funding opportunity this year.

The Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario have been receiving a multi-year grant to digitize Tweedsmuir histories and other WI documents.

Our new member, the Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation, will be digitizing and sharing the work of George Hunter, one of Canada’s most celebrated photographers.

The recipients of the Documentary Heritage Communities Program (DHCP) for 2019–2020 were announced today at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Twelve projects submitted by organizations from Ontario will receive funding. They include:

  • Images of Ontario by George Hunter, RCA – Digitization and Preservation Project (Canadian Heritage Photography Foundation), Mississauga, $24,906
  • The WI Historical Documents: A Legacy to Canada (Federated Women Institute of Ontario), Stoney Creek, $100,000

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?

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

Continue reading April is #MysteryMonth!