We love it when people get excited about the tools and services we’ve built. So much that we just have to share it. Last week, the bloggers at Genealogy Canada included us in their week in review, and they had lovely things to say:

Have you ever gone to the site OurDigitalWorld?

There are many older newspapers online that you should be aware of, and they are searchable. On their website, they say that they have the “Largest collection of Ontario Community Newspapers online, from 1810 to present day”.

This month they have put on a complete set of newspapers from Clarington, Ontario which now joins 150,000 pages from Orono, Bowmanville!

And coming soon there will be more Kawartha Lakes 150,000 pages from Lindsay to Bobcaygeon and Omemee!

This is a fantastic place to go to when you need to read about your ancestor’s lives in the villages and towns in Ontario.

A big thank-you goes to Susanna Galbraith and the Open Shelf team for interviewing Loren and Jess about our work at OurDigitalWorld.

SG: What are a few of the greatest challenges libraries and archives face when creating open heritage collections?

LF & JP: When it comes to community history, we all want to tell a story. How we tell that story —  and how we capture it — happens in many different ways. The biggest challenge we see is that it’s difficult to find standards and tools that everyone will want to adopt for individual storytelling projects without feeling as though they are “flattening” everyone’s experience. On the other hand, we also see how social tagging and highly customized tools can dilute the strength of good metadata and sharing information. Striking a balance is a big learning curve.

You can read the whole interview at http://www.open-shelf.ca/150601-digital-world/.

The American Archivist, the flagship publication of the Society of American Archivists, reviewed OurDigitalWorld and its VITA toolkit:

Continue reading ODW gets reviewed in The American Archivist!