Our fall webinar series with SOLS

SOLSBilLogo3This fall we are excited to partner with the Southern Ontario Library Service to bring you three (FREE!) webinars exploring the work ODW has done with public libraries to help provide digital content to people living in communities across the province. There’s something here for everyone: students, genealogists, researchers, historians, technologists, library or archives workers, artists, and the curious.

Click on the links to learn more and to register: Continue reading Our fall webinar series with SOLS

Emancipation Day through the eyes of white Ontarians

Today is Emancipation Day in Ontario, celebrated by our black communities to commemorate the abolition of chattel slavery throughout the British Empire, as well as Ontario’s being the first jurisdiction to do so.

But the holiday is little known to white settlers: although we often pride ourselves on our tolerance and equality, we are undereducated as to the histories of racism and oppression on our lands.  Continue reading Emancipation Day through the eyes of white Ontarians

One more week to fill out our survey on digitization in Ontario public libraries!

ODW, SOLS, and OLS-N are partnering on research to learn more about how Ontario public libraries perform digitization – their capacity, tools, knowledge, constraints, funding, collections, and assessment. We’re hoping to use this information to inform future policy and advocacy work in the province – from strategies to better resource-sharing and collaborations between organizations and government.

We can’t do this important work without your help! If you’re at a public library in Ontario, make sure someone on staff has filled out the survey. There’s one week left to get in your answers – the deadline is July 25th!

If you are unsure about how best to respond, please read over the questions in advance of submitting. You may want to save a copy of this document to draft your answers.

You can find the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ODW-digitization-on-pl

Extended deadline! Our survey on digitization in Ontario public libraries ends on July 25th

Every public library in Ontario is invited to submit a response to this survey, even if you have never done digitization and don’t intend to. This survey should take 30 minutes to complete. We have extended the deadline – please submit your response by July 25th. Continue reading Extended deadline! Our survey on digitization in Ontario public libraries ends on July 25th

Our survey on digitization in Ontario public libraries closes July 15th

Thanks so much to all of the respondents so far to our survey on the state of digitization activities in Ontario’s public libraries. We’ve already collected lots of useful information – but we want more! We’re aiming for a response from every single one of our 310 public and First Nations libraries. This means you!

Please find a half-hour to fill out the survey as best you can. We’re looking for responses even from libraries who have no intention of ever doing digitization, and have no special collections or archives.

You can find the survey here, as well as a link to a copy of the questions in case you need to draft your answers in advance. Please get in touch if you have any suggestions or need any help!

Our digitization in Ontario public libraries survey is open!

Our survey on the state of digitization activities in Ontario public libraries is now live!

If you’re a staff member of one of the 310 public libraries in Ontario, we invite you to complete the following survey. Your library should already have received an email from SOLS or OLS-N – we’re looking for one response per library, so make sure you coordinate with your coworkers to answer the questions about special collections and archives, and about digitization and technology.

You can find the survey here, as well as a link to a copy of the questions in case you need to draft your answers in advance. Please get in touch if you have any suggestions or need any help!

 

OurDigitalWorld is the recipient of a second Multicultural Community Capacity Grant

OurDigitalWorld is delighted to announce that we are able to continue our project on Ontario’s multicultural history thanks to a second grant from the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration’s Multicultural Community Capacity program. This funding will support our development of educational tools to promote the history of diverse and underrepresented Ontarians and their contributions to the social and cultural life of the province. These stories, sometimes painful, are part of our heritage.

Continue reading OurDigitalWorld is the recipient of a second Multicultural Community Capacity Grant

OurDigitalWorld announces new partnership with the University of Windsor Leddy Library

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We are thrilled to announce an exciting partnership between OurDigitalWorld and the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. This agreement will leverage OurDigitalWorld’s long-standing track record in newspaper digitization and combine these efforts with recent work at the Leddy Library on community history and digital scholarship.

Continue reading OurDigitalWorld announces new partnership with the University of Windsor Leddy Library