ODW Newsletter: December 2024

That’s a wrap! 2024 in perspective

Thanks to the support of our community and clients, 2024 was a terrific year, one that strengthened ODW’s position as a trusted organization and service provider. We expanded our Board and governance structure. We sidestepped the potential devastation of a cyber attack and hardened our systems against future threats. We’re engaging new staff and technology, making our foundations stronger than ever, and we are look forward to a promising 2025.

A good year for family history

Researchers rejoice! This year, VITA collections from organizations around North America have shown significant growth in genealogical records, article and other indexes in standalone collections and linked to local newspapers. The excitement around new items invites users to comment and contribute their own material to existing collections, sharing community stories and weaving new connections. We also saw the addition of new exhibits, books, diaries, and church records, postcards and photos, as well as audio and video recordings.

Explore the collections

More to explore with VITA Collections

New this year…

When we talk about building bridges, not only are we talking about physical connections, we’re also talking about connecting individuals with issues, identities, and ideas. When we build bridges, we build hope. ~Ontario Library Association

ODW is excited to be back at OLA Super Conference in 2025! We look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new people, answering your questions, and demonstrating ODW’s products and services.

Visit us at our poster presentation “Bridging the Breach: Handling a Cyberattack” on the expo floor, Friday, January 31.

Drop by or book a meeting by emailing odw@ourdigitalworld.org

OurDigitalWorld Newsletter April 2024

After the Eclipse…

There is a certain irony that a full eclipse was occurring over North America just as OurDigitalWorld was emerging from a long service outage.

Our own path of totality started February 25, the day – as chance would have it – we presented a live webinar about searching the digital newspaper collections. Thankfully all examples were screenshots, since all the online collections were unexpectedly returning blank error screens. The next day, we were told that we were caught in a massive system shut down at the City of Hamilton, Ontario in response to a cyber attack. Read more…

Updates from…

Community Newspaper Working Group

At the recent meeting of the Community Newspaper Working Group (CNWG), discussions centred around proposals from two newspaper companies, TorStar and PostMedia. Read more…

Coalition for Canadian Digital Heritage

The CCDH is excited to announce it’s Year in Review for 2023. Read more…

Visit us at our upcoming conferences

We’re sponsoring

We’re attending

We’re speaking

ODW Quarterly Newsletter: September 2022

Farewell to Summer!

We hope you’ve had a wonderful few months to relax and take a break from the hustle and bustle. We’re gearing up for a busy season and looking forward to everything this autumn will bring!

This Quarterly shares some exciting news: upcoming collaborations, digital collection highlights, VITA Toolkit upgrades, conferences and save-the-dates.

Read the full newsletter here.

Painting by George Wolfe courtesy of Thames Art Gallery Permanent Collection

ODW Wikipedia Project Page

Thanks to practicum student Jamie Morin, we have a GLAM/ODW Wiki project page underway. The WikiProject will act as ODW’s central location on Wikipedia and was developed to build ODW’s authority as an author in the Wikisphere and provide an infrastructure to launch more projects and expand existing sections as needed.

For the launch, we have included one project: Ontario Community Newspapers. This project links in all articles about newspaper publications already created and published on Wikipedia by ODW staff and volunteers. The project invites volunteers to:

  • check and improve citations on already existing articles
  • connect orphan articles to related Wikipedia articles
  • edit existing Wikipedia articles
  • upload new Wikipedia articles

We invite our VITA partners and the wider community to participate in growing this project and building a strong web of information around Ontario Community Newspapers with links back to online digital newspaper collections.

Visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/OurDigitalWorld

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

Happy holidays from OurDigitalWorld!

CKM003402365f.jpg
Holiday postcard from the Chatham-Kent Museum digital collections.

Our best wishes for health and happiness in the new year!

The ODW offices will be closed from December 24th to January 2nd. We look forward to working with you in 2019!

Our INK and GovDocs collections will be unavailable until December 26th for planned downtime over the holidays. Many newspapers will still be available at search.ourontario.ca and many government documents will still be available on the Internet Archive at archive.org/details/governmentpublications.

Happy holidays from ODW!

 

Our best wishes for the holidays and the coming year. We’ve got some exciting projects in store for 2018 and can’t wait to share them with you!

Our offices will be closed from December 22nd until January 4th. You can email any of our staff during that time, and someone will get back to you as soon as they can. Have safe and happy holidays!