Celebrating Black History Month – every month

This month we’re highlighting collections that take a deep dive into the Black experience. For Black History Month on social media, we’ve showcased some significant resources in VITA Collections for understanding and exploring Black history in Ontario and beyond.

As always, we recommend reviewing and searching the Abolitionist Newspaper collections. Past blog posts have featured these papers in articles like Fugitive Voices: Black-run periodicals in Abolition-era Canada and news about the re-scanning of the Voice of the Fugitive newspaper in Announcing the Abolitionists Collection.

South Western Ontario was a major crossing point for fugitive slaves and freemen coming from the United States. To learn more about this aspect of Chatham Kent and area, check out the wonderful exhibit “Let us march on until Victory is won,” from Chatham Kent Museum https://vitacollections.ca/ckmuseums/620/exhibit.

Exhibit illustrated with original artwork by Mariah Alexander

Family history collections often end up at local archives and public libraries, one is the Richard Bell Family Fonds at Brock University includes 85 photographs, tintypes and documents spanning c.1850 to 1950. The extended family lived in London and St. Catharines and the collection includes birth, death and marriage certificates, images from family bibles, snapshots from family day trips, and more. https://images.ourontario.ca/Brock/2817492/gallery

Community collections often highlight significant citizens. We want to broadcast some of the stories we’ve found from our VITA client collections. For example: Bob Turner, previously a catcher for the Chicago White Sox, Turner became Colborne’s first Recreational Director https://vitacollections.ca/cramahelibrary/355/exhibit.

Bob Turner, Colborn e Recreational Director

Halton Region boasts the remarkable Veteran Henry Thomas Shepherd, who fought in both World Wars and whose story is shared in a virtual exhibit created by Halton Hills Public Library https://vitacollections.ca/HaltonHillsImages/558/exhibit.

And read on about Dr. Saint-Firmin Monestime. Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Dr. Monestime moved from Haiti to open a practice in Timmins, but a chance encounter in a restaurant convinced him to put down roots in Mattawa instead, a Northern Ontario town where he would later became the first Black mayor in Canada: https://vitacollections.ca/multiculturalontario/476/exhibit/17.

Black History in Canada includes advocacy and civil action for human rights here and around the world. The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) houses resources for researchers and scholars and features a fascinating Black Voices collection on their site https://vitacollections.ca/cerlacresourcecentre/search.

Researchers of all kinds use the collections to find history and illustrations for material of all kinds. Recently, a researcher contacted us with thanks for the transcripts of Schooner Days for background material about Caymanian Captain Culrose McLaughlin (1896-1992) and two-time Canada’s Cup winner Commodore Aemilius Jarvis (1860-1940) for her article Black Yachting History.

We’re privileged to be able to promote and share these collections online, resources that can help us celebrate Black History every month. If you have a story or collection you want highlighted, contact us at info@ourdigitalworld.org.

Banner image “Henry and Susanna Maude Shepherd Family” courtesy of Halton Hills Public Library.

Using historic timelines to describe multicultural experiences

This is a guest post by Guanqiao (Tony) Fu, a student in the History program at University of Toronto Mississauga.

As an intern, I am working with OurDigitalWorld on creating digitized historical timeline exhibits. This is an opportunity for me to learn new skills and knowledge while putting my historical research skills to use.

Image of article titled Town Celebrates Portuguese Month, from the Oakville Beaver, May 7, 2003 — **Town Celebrates Portuguese Month, Oakville Beaver, May 7, 2003**

Working with OurDigitalWorld to create timelines to tell stories of others using creative exhibits is the exact experience that will refine my research skills while reminding me that studying history puts the story of humanity in our hands. I am working on three exhibit projects, focusing on the Portuguese Canadian Diaspora, Chinese Migrants in Canada, and Ontario’s Experiences of Wars and Conflicts for the past 100 years. Finding and selecting primary sources while interpreting them in ways of bias-free story-telling is perhaps the greatest challenge I have encountered so far, and it is also where I learned the most. Through the past three months of researching, organizing and training, I have become more familiar with the ways of understanding primary sources and how to use my understanding to produce works—a necessary skill for historians to succeed.

Photo of Portuguese protesters at Toronto City Hall 1971 — **Anti-fascist and anti-colonial protest by PCDA members on Nathan Phillips Square, 1971**

What is most interesting about my experience creating timelines with OurDigitalWorld is perhaps my positionality as a Chinese international student studying in Canada. I have been staying in Canada since the COVID-19 pandemic hit and my own cultural background and social bonds enabled me to interpret the historic development here from a different perspective. I often have the feeling that even though I have no difficulties interacting and connecting with people here as an international student, I still feel like an “outsider” who cannot fully interpret or comprehend other people’s experiences. For example, I discovered material about Portuguese settlers in the 1970s actively participating in the pacifist protest against Portugal’s military operations in Africa despite their Canadian nationality. I first found it hard to interpret living as both Portuguese and Canadian at the same time because I grew up in a monocultural society where this diversity is unimaginable. I could not help but try to interpret Portuguese settlers’ identities separately, and it was not until after I read about the communal networks Portuguese settlers established to honour their traditions did I realize that it is possible for a community to be proud members of several societies without breaking off from their own culture. Different communities have their own culture, and these cultural traditions continuously develop despite how each community chooses to express them. There is no absolute contradiction between cultures, only how people interpret and treat how each expresses themselves.

And this is what historical study is all about! No matter how we express our perception towards a topic, a community, or perhaps an event, we inevitably use our own perspective, which is shaped by our own culture and experiences. Working with OurDigitalWorld allows me to further reflect on my own positionality, to expand my own knowledge of history while expressing my findings using timelines that are both creative and informative. To me, history is about the greater cause of telling humanity’s story by collecting representative instances and putting them together as a portrait of our civilization, and this practical work is both an exciting and enjoyable experience that extends my career as an undergraduate student far beyond classrooms and libraries.

See Guanqiao’s exhibit and timeline about the Portuguese Diaspora in Ontario here.

Inconvenient Exposure: Managing controversial content in digital collections

From family history to wrongful arrests to genocide denial, our community collections are reaching more people in more places, and not everyone is happy about it. So, how do you handle online pushback about your digital collections? Is it censorship or good policy to remove a newspaper article from the collection because someone’s checkered past is affecting their present? What happens when a collection sheds new light on a controversy?

This session discusses a wide array of examples of individual and community response to controversial content online. ODW Projects Coordinator Jess Posgate talks about how organizations are managing everything from personal information removal requests to hacked servers as new or buried narratives emerge through digitization. The session hopes to instigate conversation around planning digitization of controversial – or potentially controversial – material with respect and honesty, audience experience with in-house policies around personal information, and idea sharing for sustainable and comprehensive community representation online.

Presenting at the 2022 conferences for audiences at Ontario Library Association Super Conference and Atlantic Provinces Library Association, Jess Posgate walks through scenarios that might be familiar to some and provides tips on creating organizational policy to safeguard our community members when local history goes global.

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.

Broken tiles: A retro-conversion project

Over time, certain file formats become obsolete. When ODW implemented the first pan-zoom viewer in the VITA Toolkit in the 2010s, it was based on uploading large files made up of hundreds of little tiles all zipped into a folder. The once-free tool is called Zoomify. Over the years, we encouraged our users to “Zoomify” their full images and any pages of multipage items so that those items could be zoomed into and rotated for a dynamic user experience. This was particularly useful for scrapbooks where pasted items were sometimes in different orientation within a single page. Also, detailed items like the Welland Canal Records benefitted from this “Zoomification”. However, these folders of tiles were quite “heavy”, i.e. required more storage and some eventually became corrupt.

Luckily, as technology has advanced and streamlined, the standard is now to use JPEG-2000 (JP2) files that automatically trigger the open-source IIIF (International Image Interoperable Framework)viewer in VITA. So, any user uploading full images, details, or pages can upload the considerably lighter and mobile-friendly JP2 file and it displays with all the pan, zoom and rotate options people expect for viewing this kind of material online. The trick was that we needed to go through our system and replace the old Zoomify folders with JP2 files. We were able to do this systematically for the most part, but some stubborn items required manual intervention and conversion. We were lucky to have Christine Anderson, a Mohawk College Library Technician student, who was willing and able to take on the task. Here’s Christine’s take on the project:

In my time at ODW, I have worked on (and completed) the Dezoomify project which primarily involved using the VITA Toolkit to access and replace collection images and other software for the conversion process. ODW provided me with a list that identified records with broken Zoomify files and I got started on the clean-up-work!

My primary task was to open and convert the broken Zoomify files and then replace them with JP2 files. This was done for Full images, some Details and Reverse images, as well as for many book and scrapbook pages. Using a RecordID list that was organized by Agency, I could identify all of the records with images that needed to be replaced and re-loaded.

This work was accomplished by:

Using the Dezoomify tool which works by copying and pasting the item’s public URL into the tool
“Dezoomify” merges the tiles that make up a Zoomify file and that merged image can then be saved as a JPG
I used Irfanview software to convert JPG files to JP2 files, and I assigned their original file names so that the agencies could trace the display files back to their master copies
In the data management side of the VITA toolkit, I then activated a task-specific button to replace the broken Zoomify files with newer (and unbroken) JP2 image files
When certain Zoomify files were identified as too corrupt and this simpler workflow did not work, a workaround was created:
- In some cases, I could open the PDF file associated with pages and save them as JP2 – although these tend to be quite large, so we adjusted the quality during the conversion process to reduce the storage overhead
- In other cases, where there was no PDF, I would open an alternate JPG file for Full and Detail images and simply used the standard “Replace” button for the Full or Details file
The new files then automatically populate along with their records and now remain either public or non-public according to their original setting.

The JP2 files open in a IIIF viewer and provide excellent Pan-Zoom capabilities, like the slideshow below illustrates.

The Dezoomify project concentrated mostly on file creation and replacement (for example: digital collections from libraries’ local history/genealogy departments), and to an extent included working on the Metadata for the files submitted. The project consisted of a bunch of repetitive tasks that were not able to be automated and had to be manually manipulated/updated. This was important database work that will ensure the integrity and currency of the files uploaded to the clients’ digital collections and sites going forward.

There will always be advancements in technology standards and these inevitably require adjustment and retroconversion activities. With Christine’s work complete, the ODW team was able to purge a considerable overhead of corrupt and cumbersome Zoomify folders from the database. The positive outcomes of this work is a reduction in the affected agencies’ storage and the cumulative burden of these obsolete files on the servers, plus Christine gained new technological skills that she can carry forward in her career as a Library Technician. It’s a win-win!

Daily British Whig 1902-1926 now online

OurDigitalWorld is excited to announce that the Daily British Whig from 1902-1926 is online. The Frontenac Heritage Foundation undertook the project to digitize this significant set of community news, covering the first of the World Wars, and make the papers available as part of the larger Kingston newspaper collection hosted by the Kingston Frontenac Public Library.

With the addition of these almost 90,000 pages, the online Kingston newspaper collection has doubled and now ranges more than 100 years, from 1810-1926. The Digital Kingston VITA Toolkit site at http://vitacollections.ca/digital-kingston/search allows users to search by keyword and facet results to sort or narrow them by date, publication, and more.

OurDigitalWorld worked with Library and Archives Canada via the Canadian Research Knowledge Network to access and digitize the microfilm copies, and with University of Windsor to achieve high quality positional OCR processing. The newspapers are uploaded into the VITA Digital Toolkit for search and display with full text search and hit highlighted results. Frontenac Heritage Foundation member John Grenville used the new primary materials to research a local architect Ernest Beckwith, designer of the Orpheum Theatre in Kingston, and returned very specific results.

ODW, Kingston Frontenac Public Library and the Frontenac Heritage Foundation encourage genealogists, students, and other researchers’ use and exploration of this important set of newspapers. To read the full press release and for contact information regarding the project, click here.