Jess and Frances will be hosting a series of live Q&A sessions for anyone learning about VITA this summer. Whether you’re a first-timer, a summer student or intern, a long-time user looking to brush up, or an advanced user with ambitious questions, Jess and Frances will be providing demos and walk-throughs upon request.
There’s no sign-up necessary, and everyone is welcome!
Our first brown-bag lunch session is Monday, June 12th with more dates to follow:
- June 12th, 12pm EST
- June 26th, 12pm EST
- July 10th, 12pm EST
- July 24th, 12pm EST
- August 7th, 12pm EST
- August 21st, 12pm EST
See the Training Calendar for dates. If you can’t make it, be sure to check out the webinar recordings on our YouTube channel and the VITA Help site!
We’ve also created a handy infographic for you to refer to when you’re getting started or want to know where to look for more resources:
The Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport has released its Annual Survey of Public Libraries and now’s the time to make your VITA collections count!
We’re ironing out a couple of details, but then will provide step-by-step instructions on how to include your VITA content and traffic statistics in the survey.
Follow the links in this FOPL post to start your survey
SOLS is offering a series of webinars about completing your survey.
Stay tuned to our blog and help.vitatoolkit.ca for more information and documentation.
Not from Ontario? Tell us about any similar surveys so we can help you include your collections!
We’ve added a new feature to VITA: items, collections, and pages in your VITA collections now generate Cards when the links are shared on Twitter.
Read more on the OurDigitalWorld blog.
Highland Park Public Library in Illinois: 11,500 newspaper pages (various titles covering 1883-1922) and index
Downers Grove Public Library in Illinois: 8,500 pages of the Downers Grove Reporter newspaper
Kawartha Lakes Public Library: 42,000 newspaper pages (various titles, 1865-1937)
Whitchurch-Stouffville Public Library: 5,000 newspaper pages – from microfilm all the way up to born-digital PDFs!
New VITA Training Webinars are now live! Users and the public can now access helpful webinars about the features and workflows of VITA Toolkit. Geared for the VITA Toolkit user, these webinars are great for everyone to learn more in an on-demand environment about interactive features, managing and customizing sites, working with groups of records, newspapers, and more. We also cover other heritage technology, such as our series on using OpenRefine to clean up your data.
Subscribe to our Youtube channel to be kept up-to-date on all of our uploads. We’re always looking for feedback on what else to include, so send us your requests.
Don’t forget about the wealth of other resources on our Help Site – and if you have any questions, try posting in our ….
Building digital collections is more than scanning! Everyone has to consider issues like privacy, copyright and personal information then create best practices and policies as part of the process. We wanted to have a shared space for exchanging knowledge and experiences about these and other aspects of building and sharing online collections. The new VITA Community Forum includes threads that range from “copyright on plaques” to “removing audio noise from recordings” and “digitizing yearbooks – personal information issues.” The VITA Community Forum welcomes the public to read and contribute–what are your questions?
We’re organizing two sessions at the OLA Super Conference! You can also visit us in the Expo Booth on Thursday and Friday – at booth #536!
When Things Get Personal: Digitizing Your Community History
Thursday, February 2 10:45AM
Join ODW and our panel to discuss examples of personal information requests, policies and management from community newspapers & indexes, school publications, and Tweedsmuir histories. We’ll discuss some real-life experiences of the ethics and challenges of undertaking community digitization projects to start the conversation.
Bridging the Gap: Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, Museums
Friday, February 3 2PM
Learn more about Linked Open Data and why it is important to/for the LAM Community. Our panel will address issues in collaborating on LOD projects across LAM institutions and the current state of LOD in Canada.
http://www.olasuperconference.ca/
Ontario’s newspaper collections keep growing, plus more from Illinois!
Clarington Public Library
- The complete set of newspapers from Clarington area are online now
- Browse & search ~150,000 pages from the Orono, Bowmanville, & Clarington area!
Coming soon…
- More Kawartha Lakes area newspaper titles and issues, from Lindsay to Bobcaygeon and Omemee!
- Highland Park and Downers Grove Public Libraries from Illinois are adding community newspapers & index records
Register now for upcoming training sessions!
See the VITA Toolkit training calendar for upcoming dates and sessions.
Sessions include the basics like:
- Adding and Managing records
- Managing your Agency
- Managing your Site
- Creating Exhibits
Media-specific sessions for text, newspapers, indexing, audio, & video
Community interaction modules like contributions, favourites, and testimonials!
And advanced features like web pages, batch uploads and using templates.
All our webinars are online, in real time, and they’re free and open to everyone!
Join us November 15, 22, 29 & December 6.
You’re invited to take the new VITA Toolkit Help site for a test drive.
Look familiar? It is! We’re harnessing the power of VITA Toolkit to help you and here’s how…
The new VITA Toolkit Help brings together
all your support materials
in an interactive, open access site.Go to help.vitatoolkit.ca
Like our look?
VITA Help has a new look and some custom display features we can share with you!
What you’ll find at VITA Toolkit Help…
- familiar & easy to use platform
- no login required
- keyword & advanced search
- browse by group or topic
Manuals for every workflow
Fully searchable manuals can be browsed online or downloaded in full, by the page, or chapter-by-chapter
New guides about…
- Promoting your site
- Helping users search your collections
- Sample plans, policies & permissions
- Hosting digitization day events
Share your tips
Use the “comments” feature to add your work-around tips and advice for everyone to see and help build a powerful knowledge base about using VITA. And, yes, you can be anonymous!
Goodbye Toolkit Chat: Hello help!
Have a workflow questions?
Got an error message?
Email help@vitatoolkit.ca
Visit the help site at http://help.vitatoolkit.ca
More Community Newspapers collections:
New titles, indexes, and more than 100,000 searchable pages
Richmond Hill Newspapers
New titles from City of Kawartha Lakes
- Search pages and index records of the Canadian Post
- Plus Victoria/ Warder and the Fenelon Falls Gazette, 1876-1916
New US titles from Cook Memorial Public Library
- Search Lake County / Libertyville Independent, 1894-1922
- Plus ~40,000 index records
