Our Digital World

The Ontario Government has ended funding for Knowledge Ontario. It is being disbanded. Assets (money, equipment, intellectual property, etc) are being transferred to stable or committed torch-bearers who will give best‐effort for ongoing support and operation.

One of KO's components was OurOntario which housed digital collections from libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, community groups, government agencies. It included a collection of digitized newspapers and and indexes, now at ink.ourontario.ca and  news2.ourontario.ca/

The torch-bearer for the newspaper collection is Our Digital World which:

• Provides access to over 4.1 million digital images, videos, scrapbooks, newspaper collections and more – via the ourontario.ca portal
• Offers the VITA digital toolkit for creating and managing multimedia collections, indexing and newspaper projects, including content hosting and display site (see vitatoolkit.ca for the nitty-gritty)
• Has created the largest online archive of Ontario newspapers (the fourth largest public newspaper archive in the world)
• Provides easy search and access to more than 32,000 Ontario government documents from yesterday and today
• Implements successful projects like the Community Digitization Project and is a trusted resource for digitization project planning

Our Digital World is seeking a Heritage Trust Project grant, the result should be known in early May. Find out more about Our Digital World at their stand at the OGS conference in Kingston.