The following item was posted on the Knowledge Ontario website on Monday, April 18th, 2011
Knowledge Ontario has been informed by both the Ministry of Tourism and Citizenship and by the Ministry of Education that our funding requests have been denied. This is, of course, a large disappointment. This news will raise questions and concerns in the Knowledge Ontario community, but this possibility has already been considered as part of the future funding scenarios we have been working on since January. KO will now engage its partner organizations and all those who offer KO services in framing the possibilities and fleshing out the details as we go forward.
The board and staff of Knowledge Ontario continue to be buoyed by the extraordinary support and encouragement we have received in putting forward these funding requests. We also acknowledge the acts of advocacy and support that so many of you undertook on behalf of Knowledge Ontario. We are tremendously grateful.
While this is difficult news, there is more to say and our story continues. More in the following days and weeks.
Comment: While Knowledge Ontario has a low profile in the genealogical community their initiatives, such as their contribution to these newspaper digitization projects, are noteworthy. I have written to premier McGuinty, my MPP, lamenting this ill-advised decision.
2 comments:
Knowledge Ontario pays for Ancestry in Ontario public libraries so ti would be a great loss for genealogists.
Knowledge Ontario provides a host of services, including many databases and bite-sized tech tutorials as well as live reference services and more, but the myriad of primary materials available for genealogists and historians through the Ontario News portal and OurOntario.ca is really astonishing. As mentioned, the digitized newspaper content hosted and made searchable by Our Ontario covers more than 200 years of Ontario history available here: http://www.ourontario.ca/demo/News.html; as well, the OurOntario.ca (http://ourontario.ca/) portal contains hundreds of digitized historical objects and collections about and from Ontario. And, it's free: no user subscriptions, no user fees. For people who contribute to these online resources, including public libraries, museums, historical societies, archives, academic and special libraries, the recent funding announcement has a lot of impact, and this will trickle down to the end user in terms of reduced access to and quality of primary materials so critical to researchers of all kinds. The genealogy community is a strong one. Please make your voice heard.
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