Pilot: Handwritten Character Recognition (HCR)

As part of our digitization post production services, ODW has been achieving excellent results processing handwritten materials with Google’s Optical Character Recognition software. For a pilot project, we processed approximately 1120 duplex pages of pre-1910 handwritten Parish registers (births, marriages, deaths, mainly baptisms) digitized from public-use microfilm. Despite the quality of the images (scratched film and high contrast photography) the page images were split, deskewed, cropped and run through the  OCR software for some very rewarding results.

Applying this to our ongoing work with the Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario (FWIO), we processed a recent batch of scrapbooks from the Grace Patterson Branch to provide full text search of the entire contents whether handwritten or typed. For all-in-one projects we will continue to apply the HCR software

Moving forward, we intend to experiment with Microsoft’s Azure HCR support which may be surpassing Google’s project — definitely worth trying to compare some pages! The development of HCR is burgeoning at companies like Google and Microsoft, so we can expect progressively better results over time.

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

OurOntario.ca temporarily offline

This week we’re upgrading our infrastructure! Some of our services will be offline while we improve our services, including the OurOntario.ca search portal.

While this is happening, you can still access our VITA members’ sites and our aggregate collections: news.ourontario.ca for Ontario Community News, ink.ourontario.ca for full-page newspaper content, govdocs.ourontario.ca for Ontario government publications, and our new Abolitionists newspaper collection at news.ourontario.ca/abolition. These sites bring you province-wide materials from our VITA partners and other collaborators – much of the content you would normally find on the OurOntario.ca search portal.

If you’re a VITA user, remember that you can log in to your VITA account from data.vitatoolkit.ca and access documentation and resources at help.vitatoolkit.ca.

Thank you for your patience as we improve our services!

 

Applications are open for the Virtual Museum of Canada Exhibits Investment Stream

The Virtual Museum of Canada has opened up its annual call for applications for its Exhibits Investment Stream. This funding, up to $250,000, can pay for digitization, metadata, research, curation, writing, and creating virtual exhibits on a subject of your choice. This is a great opportunity to digitize a special collection that will benefit from contextualization, research, and wider public engagement. Continue reading Applications are open for the Virtual Museum of Canada Exhibits Investment Stream

OurDigitalWorld’s 2018 Year In Review

odwbutton-largefontWe’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

Oral history project resources

CaptureOne thing we heard a lot during SuperCon was an interest in creating new heritage materials in communities in Ontario and across Canada. Many of our VITA members (and some new organizations too!) are looking into local activities like digitizing borrowed material from residents, and conducting oral histories.

We’re compiling a list with some guides and tools for running an oral history project. Here are some of our favourites: Continue reading Oral history project resources

Oakville’s A Day In The Life Project

ADayintheLife_18-12-01psdStarting on Saturday, Oakville Public Library’s fourth annual A Day In The Life photo project launches.

Using the VITA Digital Toolkit‘s Contribution module, OPL gathers photographs from the community snapped within a 24-hour period (allowing a week for community members to upload and describe their works) and shares them in their VITA collection – they’re also curated into a virtual exhibit for viewing by year. So far they’ve built up their collections with hundreds of submitted photographs from all over the community!

Continue reading Oakville’s A Day In The Life Project

Our VITA sites are back online!

We are thrilled to say that we’ve finished the restore process for our VITA Toolkit partner sites. All sites are now back online, and your OurOntario.ca search results should be working.

You may discover an occasional item record that fails to load as we finish restoring some of the biggest files in our collections.

screenshot-images.ourontario.ca-2018.09.18-11-31-12
See a list of our VITA Toolkit sites on vitatoolkit.ca.

If you visit a VITA site and continue to see an error message about the site being offline, please make sure to clear your cache and refresh the original URL (removing the “/offline” at the end).

If you have any further questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to get in touch at help@vitatoolkit.ca. If you’re with a VITA member organization and want to stay updated about the administrative side of VITA, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.