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.
New additions to VITA collections!
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 videos on our Youtube channel!
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 ….
Community forum
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?
Plan your OLA Super Conference 2017!
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.
More Community Newspapers collections!
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
Training Tuesdays are back!
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.
Visit the new VITA Toolkit Help site!
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
What’s new in VITA collections!
More Community Newspapers collections:
New titles, indexes, and more than 100,000 searchable pages
Richmond Hill Newspapers
- ~63,000 pages of searchable local newspapers, from 1857-1979
- And a fresh new site
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
VITA 5.3: Upgrades & New Features
Data management features: All about Groups!
“Associate Agency” groups for small collections
For agencies that manage small collections from affiliate groups in the community, you can use the new Group: Associate Agency settings to provide the affiliate’s contact information along with their records.
Too many groups?
Now you can show/hide Groups shared by other agencies…
In data management on your record “Group” screen, click the “Show/Hide” button to see or not see other agencies’ shared groups
Public site features: Meeting user needs, better…
“Print record” button
Let your users print a formatted version of just the metadata from your records.
One click and the user’s print dialogue box will appear. The print-ready result is a formatted version of the record with the record URL, title, description panel contents, and no graphics or files.
Try it here
Show us your thumbs!
Display thumbnails for external Links…
Just like in exhibits – when you add an item from an external URL, now you can add a thumbnail to illustrate it!
Things you can do with JPEG 2000s…
Add a credit line
While watermarking interferes with the user’s experience of an image, adding a credit line ensures that your organization’s brand floats in the bottom right hand corner of your JPG 2000 viewer.
OCR Snippets 4 ways
OCR can be downright ugly, but it’s oh, so useful. So we’ve come up with some new ways for you to display your full-text results:
- No snippet (just page links to where the text is found)
- Text snippets (exposed OCR result)
- Image snippets (a picture of the first result – for JPEG2000 only)
- Text & Image (when you have multiple file formats)
Scheduled Maintenance – Thursday Oct 15th
On Thursday, October 15, 2015 OurDigitalWorld will be conducting our semi-annual hardware review and server maintenance.
There are some upgrades to install so we anticipate having the servers ( and therefore access to our services) offline from 11 AM until 1 PM.
If we are finished in advance of this, we will post a further update.