The ODW virtual team is ready and able to continue to provide services via our regular channels.
As most of you will be connecting/working/living virtually in the next while, we’ll be highlighting our online heritage resources. We’ll also be providing tips for our VITA partners on showcasing their digital collections, and continuing to work with the GLAM sector on newspaper digitization projects. Stay tuned and stay well!
OurOntario.ca portal
OurOntario.ca currently searches almost 2.5 million photos, documents, oral histories, paintings, postcards, and exhibits, including newspaper and book pages!
Collections from 300 heritage organizations in Ontario, including more than 200 VITA platform partners
Ontario Community Newspapers and INK
Two major gateways to hundreds of digitized Ontario newspaper titles, full text and index records, over 200 years of publishing history, ranging from Windsor to Waterloo, Thunder Bay to Petawawa!
See a full list of regions covered here
Ontario Government Documents portal
Ontario government documents (PDFs) collected by the Legislative Library, with full-text search, ability to browse by subject and ministry, and serial publications.
Search our VITA Toolkit Partners’ collections and exhibits
Explore your region and beyond: Collections from Ontario, British Columbia, Illinois, Michigan, and more, including community history, heritage and current newspapers, local history books & oral histories, on every topic from military, women’s and multicultural histories to built heritage, local sites, community contributions, and more…
See what organizations are contributing and building collections, click on their site names here
Illinois Newspapers
One place to search digitized newspapers with index records for access to dozens of Chicago-area publications from Libertyville, Wilmette, Algonquin Area and more.
Jess Posgate will be at the 7th annual KPL Genealogy Fair this Saturday, November 2nd, where she’ll be presenting a workshop: “Finding Your Family History Using Our Digital World.” We’ll have a booth too!
Doors open at 9am, and the day wraps up at 3:30 pm. All events are free with no registration required.
We 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!
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!
On September 10th, 2019, University of Windsor Librarian and ODW Board Member Art Rhyno gave a presentation called “Using Local Newspapers for Genealogy Research” to the Essex OGS/Essex County Branch, Ontario Ancestors. You can read a copy of his presentation slides here, and watch a video of his presentation here. Continue reading Using Local Newspapers for Genealogy Research
Today we’re offering a new free resource brought to you by the OurDigitalWorld team:
The Abolitionist Newspapers of the 1850s digital portal.
As one of the first places for fugitives from slavery to end up after their travels on the Underground Railroad, and a place where many people called for a new black utopia, Ontario has a rich history of black publishing. This new site, built with our VITA Digital Toolkit, offers full-text searching and browsing of three publications:
Along with digitized microfilm of the Provincial Freeman and the True Royalist, we are delighted to announce that, for the very first time, low-quality microfilm of the Voice of The Fugitive has been replaced with high-quality, full-colour digital photographs of each and every page still available.
We’ve recently updated our well-loved and frequently-used digitization resources list. We’ve removed a number of outdated resources, and added new sections on Indigenous materials, privacy, and general industry resources.
As always, if you have anything to recommend for inclusion on this page, we’d love to hear from you. Continue reading Check out our updated digitization resources page
At last month’s Archivists’ Association of Ontario annual conference in Belleville, Loren presented on the state of our work trying to safeguard local newspapers in the wake of multiple closures.
Continue reading Our AAO presentation on stewarding Ontario’s local news
It’s spring, and that means spring-cleaning time. If you’re thinking about refresing the look and feel of your VITA Digital Toolkit site, we can help!
Our helpsite has tons of useful resources we’ve written about how to navigate and customize the front-end of VITA. We’ve also added some example resources from other VITA members who have graciously shared templates, posters, event plans, and other documents you can learn from. Continue reading Spring-clean your VITA site with these design resources
