ODW Newsletter: December 2024

That’s a wrap! 2024 in perspective

Thanks to the support of our community and clients, 2024 was a terrific year, one that strengthened ODW’s position as a trusted organization and service provider. We expanded our Board and governance structure. We sidestepped the potential devastation of a cyber attack and hardened our systems against future threats. We’re engaging new staff and technology, making our foundations stronger than ever, and we are look forward to a promising 2025.

A good year for family history

Researchers rejoice! This year, VITA collections from organizations around North America have shown significant growth in genealogical records, article and other indexes in standalone collections and linked to local newspapers. The excitement around new items invites users to comment and contribute their own material to existing collections, sharing community stories and weaving new connections. We also saw the addition of new exhibits, books, diaries, and church records, postcards and photos, as well as audio and video recordings.

Explore the collections

More to explore with VITA Collections

New this year…

When we talk about building bridges, not only are we talking about physical connections, we’re also talking about connecting individuals with issues, identities, and ideas. When we build bridges, we build hope. ~Ontario Library Association

ODW is excited to be back at OLA Super Conference in 2025! We look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new people, answering your questions, and demonstrating ODW’s products and services.

Visit us at our poster presentation “Bridging the Breach: Handling a Cyberattack” on the expo floor, Friday, January 31.

Drop by or book a meeting by emailing odw@ourdigitalworld.org

OurDigitalWorld Newsletter: Autumn 2024

This Fall at ODW: A flurry of activity

Some people say September is the new January – and it certainly feels that way in the ODW offices. This autumn has been a flurry of activity. The harsh reality of vinegar syndrome has meant that there is a real upsurge in digitization projects, so there are many recent additions to new and existing collections. Internally, our Board has grown and we’re happy to be working with such an incredible collection of people. As well, we’re looking forward to seeing everyone at some upcoming conferences, and excited about collaborating with CRKN to bring an improved set of Abolitionist newspapers online for better and wider access. Even though it’s fall, we’re celebrating a season of growth and so much to share.

Read the full newsletter

Online newspaper collections continue to grow

Learn more about recent additions to the online collections here

All of these papers are also available through the Ontario Community Newspapers site and OurOntario.ca

More news…

Abolitionist newspaper project with Canadiana
Meet the ODW Board
Upcoming conferences

Read the full newsletter

OurDigitalWorld Newsletter August 2024

The New Safety Dance: Microfilm collections at risk

A recent article about another major collection being affected by the degradation of acetate microfilm or “vinegar syndrome” at London Public Library is reigniting conversations about how to preserve the millions of reels of community history, newspapers, photographs, government documents, and more. The culprit, cellulose-acetate film base, was introduced in the early 1900s as the “safety film” to replace the more flammable nitrate film base for microformats and photographs. Now, instead of spontaneous combustion the cellulose acetate film degrades, releasing a tell-tale acidic smell…

Read the full newsletter

Making Connections

Learning & Linking

Our recent work with Mohawk College Library Technician student Latania Hyatt educated us about strategies for business to business networking through platforms like LinkedIn. Latania has on the ground experience with networking, profile promotion and exposure through social platforms. Her main points for posting are: Define your audience, Use consistent messaging, Invite interaction, & Analyze performance. We love learning from our placement students and this kind of injection of expertise increases our ability to reach out and make connections!

Connect with us

VITA Mysteries

This unique feature of the VITA Digital Collections software allows for Mystery Questions like “Where is this lighthouse?” invite users to Comment, share their expertise, and respond to other comments. Every approved comment on a record becomes full-text searchable. Unlike social media, comments can be searched, maintained, exported and remains under the stewardship of contributing organization. User comments help complete the public record and build bridges between collection objects and the community.

Search Mysteries

History of a Police Force

Dive into the rich history of the Fredericton Police Force and explore decades of dedicated service to the Fredericton community. This collection of photos, medals, plaques, and other items highlight the people, events, awards and even canines that make up the history of the Fredericton Police Force.
See More

Read the full newsletter

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…

Visit us at our upcoming conferences

We’re sponsoring

We’re attending

We’re speaking

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/

ODW “Quarterly” December 2023

2023 has been a productive and fruitful year here at ODW. We’re proud to have helped some spectacular collections emerge and grow, to support communities and grassroots organizations leverage their resources to ensure their local history is discovered far and wide, and to further our connections and relationships in the GLAM community across North America. After the holidays, we look forward to getting to work, taking on new challenges and sharing the rewards that 2024 has to offer. Read the complete newsletter here

ODW Projects

Covering everything from troop movements at the end of World War II to a local mine collapse and the elongated rescue, this year the Oshawa Public Library has digitized and released mid-century content from two publications: the Oshawa Daily Times-Gazette (1947-1958) and its successor the Oshawa Times (1958-1961). The more than 100,000 pages are beautiful scans that make searching really effective, and enhance the already fulsome index and local history collection.

Explore the collection

Offering insights to the communities in Northwest Ontario, the Dryden Observer has been recording local history for the last century. In collaboration with the Dryden Public Library, the meticulously stored papers are emerging from the Dryden Museum and Archives collections for online discovery (learn more). The newspaper sites will be available in French and English, providing open access to public domain issues and IP-restricted access to those from 1934 forward. The project will be complete in 2024.

Explore the collection

Read the complete newsletter here

OurDigitalWorld Newsletter March 2023

Challenge Accepted: Data Mining with Digitized Newspapers

Text Data Mining is an exciting new direction for newspaper digitization projects, leveraging the most recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning with what is frequently the most extensive record of a community’s past, the local newspaper.

Exploring Multicultural History

Recent work by Guanqiao (Tony) Fu, a 4th year student in the History program at University of Toronto Mississauga, has resulted in three exhibit projects focusing on the Portuguese Canadian Diaspora, Chinese Migrants in Canada, and Ontario’s Experiences of Wars and Conflicts for the past 100 years.

Ontario Legislature Scrapbook Hansard Indexing Project

The earliest Hansard records were made by Journalists and published in Canada’s early national newspapers. These were clipped into a scrapbook and stored at the Ontario Legislative Library. The microfilmed books were scanned in 2019 and uploaded using the VITA Toolkit for public access. Almost 4000 index records have been uploaded so far, with particular attention to capturing personal names and subject headings that detail the Parliamentary session discussions and Acts.

Holodomor Survivor Videos

Working together, the Holodomor Research Educaton Centre (HREC) and Ukrainian Canadian Research & Documentation Centre (UCRDC) have shared the first batch of a large collection of Holodomor Survivor interviews.

The OurOntario.ca search site has a fresh new look!

Our favourite discovery site is now even easier to browse, with updated media type and contributor links, cleaner look and feel, on/off facets for results sets, and more.

Community newsletter highlights pioneer diaries

The South Marysburgh Mirror is a community newsletter from Prince Edward County, Ontario. Highlights include the transcription of Nelson Hicks’ Diaries from the turn of the 20th century.

Uncovering the Collections

Discover the vast number of resources in the VITA Toolkit collections including: Soldiers & Veterans, Built Heritage, Church Records & Vital Statistics, City & Telephone Directories.

Read the full newsletter and explore the linked collections.

OurDigitalWorld Newsletter December 2022

As 2022 draws to a close, our latest Quarterly newsletter offers some wonderful news and updates on important work:

Celebrating 10 years of OurDigitalWorld
90 Years after the Holodomor
Projects
- Enacting Reconciliation
- Ensuring Accessibility
- OurOntario.ca upcoming upgrades
Digital Collection Highlights
- Making news in the Durham Region
- Explore the Greater Chicago Area
Register now for OLA Super Conference 2023

Digitizing the Angelo Principe Italian-Canadian Newspaper Collection

Adapted from The ‘Angelo Principe’ Italian Canadian Newspaper Collection by Dr. Matteo Brera

Mastehad of La Vittoria (The Victory) Italian-Canadian newspaper

In 2014, researcher and scholar Dr. Angelo Principe donated his extensive newspaper and book collection to the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections of York University Libraries. The ‘Angelo Principe Collection’ includes materials entrusted to him for preservation by Italian Canadian activists from the first half of the twentieth century like Attilio Bortolotti and Benny Bottos, as well as the surviving documents belonging to Augusto Bersani, transnational political activist, facilitator and secret agent for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Six years later, a key part of the collection was digitized in a collaboration between Michael Moir, Head of the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, and OurDigitalWorld, resulting in a unique online collection of rare interwar Italian-language newspapers published in North America. These 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. The newspapers were processed using OurDigitalWorld’s multilingual Optical Recognition Software (OCR) and are full text searchable in both English and Italian.

The significance of this donation cannot be overstressed. Thanks to Michael Moir’s vision in working with OurDigitalWorld, and to Dr. Matteo Brera for his work adding rich contextual and descriptive metadata to the collection items, Dr. Principe’s legacy for the study of the construction of the Italian Canadian identity and transcultural exchanges between the Old and the New World is manifest in this online collection, providing an invaluable research tool to be used and enjoyed by scholars and the community.

Explore the collection at https://vitacollections.ca/yul-italiancanadiannewspapers/search

This research and digitization project was conceptualized and directed by Dr. Matteo Brera (mbrera@yorku.ca) and was made possible by generous funding from the Zorzi Family Italian-Canadian Archival Fund, established in 2017 and dedicated to encouraging the study of Italian-Canadian archival materials. The project was also sponsored by York University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies.

Daily British Whig 1902-1926 now online

OurDigitalWorld is excited to announce that the Daily British Whig from 1902-1926 is online. The Frontenac Heritage Foundation undertook the project to digitize this significant set of community news, covering the first of the World Wars, and make the papers available as part of the larger Kingston newspaper collection hosted by the Kingston Frontenac Public Library.

With the addition of these almost 90,000 pages, the online Kingston newspaper collection has doubled and now ranges more than 100 years, from 1810-1926. The Digital Kingston VITA Toolkit site at http://vitacollections.ca/digital-kingston/search allows users to search by keyword and facet results to sort or narrow them by date, publication, and more.

OurDigitalWorld worked with Library and Archives Canada via the Canadian Research Knowledge Network to access and digitize the microfilm copies, and with University of Windsor to achieve high quality positional OCR processing. The newspapers are uploaded into the VITA Digital Toolkit for search and display with full text search and hit highlighted results. Frontenac Heritage Foundation member John Grenville used the new primary materials to research a local architect Ernest Beckwith, designer of the Orpheum Theatre in Kingston, and returned very specific results.

ODW, Kingston Frontenac Public Library and the Frontenac Heritage Foundation encourage genealogists, students, and other researchers’ use and exploration of this important set of newspapers. To read the full press release and for contact information regarding the project, click here.