OurDigitalWorld Newsletter April 2024

After the Eclipse…

There is a certain irony that a full eclipse was occurring over North America just as OurDigitalWorld was emerging from a long service outage.

Our own path of totality started February 25, the day – as chance would have it – we presented a live webinar about searching the digital newspaper collections. Thankfully all examples were screenshots, since all the online collections were unexpectedly returning blank error screens. The next day, we were told that we were caught in a massive system shut down at the City of Hamilton, Ontario in response to a cyber attack. Read more…

Updates from…

Community Newspaper Working Group

At the recent meeting of the Community Newspaper Working Group (CNWG), discussions centred around proposals from two newspaper companies, TorStar and PostMedia. Read more…

Coalition for Canadian Digital Heritage

The CCDH is excited to announce it’s Year in Review for 2023. Read more…

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Revealing the Mysteries of Community Newspapers

This is a guest post by Linda Calvert, a student in the Library Technician program at Mohawk College.

For the past few weeks, I have been helping OurDigitalWorld by researching and describing the history of the Ontario newspaper publications in the Ontario Community Newspapers collections. Community newspaper histories are embedded in local lore but not often described for outsiders, which was part of the challenge I was offered for my placement. The intention is to discover and compile more historical information for the Publication records in the database, by including a general description, publication relationships between titles, and date ranges, all to enhance access points for searching and browsing the already digitized community newspapers.

While working on this project, many of the records I was able to produce were fairly straightforward, but it came to our attention that there were some publications with fascinating histories. To find out more about one mysterious story, I spoke with Caroline Goulding, CEO at the Dryden Public Library, about the Dryden Observer and how the library uncovered the paper copies for digitization.

The early history of the Dryden Observer is not well documented, so is based mainly on the remaining physical copies and local lore. The earliest physical copy is dated 1902, but its predecessor, the Wabigoon Star, dates back as early as 1895. We do know that the Observer was published by Alex Wilson Publications and was sold to Northwest Publishing in 2015 or thereabouts. After a short but bumpy run, the paper suddenly ceased publication in 2019, the phones were shut off and the staff dispersed.

Fast forward to current day when the Library and Museum wanted to find, preserve and archive the print copies of the newspaper. Assuming the back copies would have been left behind by the Northwest Publishing staff, they talked to the new owner of the Observer building to gain access to the space – only to discover the papers were nowhere to be found! It seemed the Observer newspaper was lost in every possible way.

However, in another mysterious turn of events, when a local mini-storage owner was forced to repossess one of the sea cans on his lot he opened it up and discovered the missing issues. The owner knew that Dryden Public Library and Dryden & District Museum staff were looking for these papers, so he turned them over.

Most people’s first thought on hearing this is that the papers must have been irreversibly damaged over time and would have to be dismissed as garbage. This was not the case: No one knows who did it or when, but someone had had the foresight to wrap the back copy issues in cellophane before putting them into the storage container, ensuring that they were protected from bugs, critters and moisture.

As a result of this happy discovery, the Dryden Public Library and Dryden & District Museum is digitizing the earlier copies with the help of OurDigitalWorld and with funding from the Museum Assistance Program. Public domain copies from the 1880s to the early 1930s are openly available online, with later issues also available on workstations in the Library branch at https://vitacollections.ca/drydenarchives/search.

The illustrious sea can collection has delivered back a long-standing voice for the region. Only a few gaps remain in the earliest years, especially around World War II, but the run is complete from 1932-2019. The Library and Museum not only hopes the community might have some of the missing issues to fill those gaps, but that the last copyright holder might step forward and permit the rest of the collection to be made fully available to the public.

Meanwhile, the other newspaper publication histories we complied will be added to their related records and help document their relationships within and between communities.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/dryden-observer-northern-sun-news-cease-publication-1.5201306

https://www.netnewsledger.com/2019/04/16/dryden-observer-not-publishing-this-week

https://www.netnewsledger.com/2019/06/29/historic-dryden-observer-seizes-publishing/

Winnetka Newspapers

An epic project of nearly half a million pages, the Winnetka Newspapers project features beautiful, colour images scanned from primary paper copies. The resulting blend of public domain and copyrighted material provides a deep dive and insight into the Winnetka, Illinois area.

Explore the collection

Scugog Area Newspapers

A multi-year project that brings newspapers from Lake Scugog, Port Perry and the surrounding area online providing access to Central Ontario’s history as far back as 1857. A project steered by the Lake Scugog Historical Society, this collection spotlights one of the longest running papers in Ontario – the Port Perry Star – as well as contemporary community magazines and other newspapers.

Explore the collection

Ivey Room Index Cards

This collection of scanned images came from a comprehensive card catalogue of article indexes from the London Free Press newspaper. The scanned cards were processed in-house by London Public library and the provided images and positional OCR files were ingested into the expansive Ivey Room collection on the VITA Toolkit platform.

Explore the collection.

Weston Area Newspapers 1890-2007

An epic project undertaken by the Weston Historical Society in partnership with OurDigitalWorld to digitize full runs of over 3100 issues from 16 different titles, some from extremely fragile paper copies. This extensive collection represents the history and recent community in and around Weston, Ontario, now part of the Greater Toronto Area.

Explore the collection.

Ottawa Newspapers & City Directories

The Ottawa Public Library had their microfilmed newspapers 1862-1867 and paper copies of their city directories 1863-1926 digitized and processed with ODW’s cutting edge OCR for full text search in both French and English with hit highlighted results. The collections can be searched in their bilingual VITA sites.

Explore the collection.

Recherche en francais,

Durham Newspapers & BMDs 1859-1940

The collection includes full runs of Durham, Ontario and Grey County regional newspapers digitized from microfilm. The West Grey Public Library also worked with OurDigitalWorld to extract, normalize and migrate an existing database of Birth, Marriage, and Death index records. These were cleaned and linked to the digital newspaper pages, and are all searchable on their VITA site.

Explore the collection.

Waterloo Chronicle 1868-2021

This extensive full run newspaper collection was digitized from paper and microfilm copies. OurDigitalWorld also imported and linked a set of existing article index records. The Waterloo Public Library now shares the Chronicle, Chronicle Telegraph and County Chronicle on their VITA along with an extensive local history collection.

Explore the collections.

Italian Canadian Newspaper Collection

More than 12 publications digitized for the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University, this is a rare collection of interwar Italian-language newspapers published in North America. OurDigitalWorld managed the digitization and processed the newspapers using Italian and English OCR language sets to enable full-text search in either language through the Archives’ VITA site.
The titles include Il Bollettino Italo-Canadese, Il Cittadino Canadese, Il Giornale Italo-Canadese, Il Lavoratore, L’Araldo del Canada, L’Italia, L’Italia Nuova, L’Italo Canadese, L’Operaio Italo-Canadese, La Vittoria, La Voce degli Italo-Canadesi, and La Voce Operaia.

Explore the collection.