About
The services of Our Ontario advance the discovery and sharing of Ontario’s culture, history and stories. Our goal is to help Ontarians of all ages discover the extraordinary stories contained in the digital collections of their cultural and historical organizations and communities.
Our Ontario Committee
Our Ontario Team
Our guiding principles
History
We deliver a new model of discovery services and make available digital content that reduces barriers and significantly improves access to Ontario’s history, heritage and culture by the citizens of the province. Our Ontario partners with cultural and heritage organizations of all shapes and sizes, with the goal of making our digital content discoverable to a global audience.
We are committed to working with a growing community of contributors to enable digital content to be discoverable and searchable by end-users in line with sustainable infrastructure in an evolving web environment. Read about what we can do in partnership with you!
Our Ontario Committee
Art Rhyno (Chair), former OLITA president, Systems Librarian, University of Windsor
Diane Bédard, former OLITA president, LearnOn Project Lead
Brian Bell, former OLA president
Peter Ellinger, Manager, Library Technology Applications, Ontario Legislative Library
Walter Lewis, Manager, Manager of Systems and Technical Support, Halton Hills Public Library
Our Ontario Team
Diane Bédard, Project Developer
Loren Fantin, Project Manager
Walter Lewis, Information Architect and Technical Lead
Jess Posgate, Project Coordinator
Tricia Williams, Portal Developer
Our guiding principles
Access
The Our Ontario component of Knowledge Ontario ensures that citizens of Ontario and online users can discover the wonderful digital content that exists in diverse collections across the province.
Collaboration
Our Ontario is a collaborative initiative — the most wide-ranging of the Knowledge Ontario partnership, involving all of the cultural heritage sector — libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other community groups who create and/or manage Ontario’s cultural content. An essential component is the collaboration with regional, national, and international networks so that our resources can be discovered and delivered to a growing number of users.
Standards
Standards are integral to manage information and to present data in a consistent and meaningful way. Standards are also essential in allowing for integrated access to and searching of a wide range of resources across different systems. It’s important that the metadata that allows for the discovery, searching, delivery, presentation and exchange of our digital resources be robust and reusable. This ensures a flexible and adaptable behind-the-scenes model for integrating data across networks and for guaranteeing sustainability.
Multi-faceted approach to participation
We are committed to ensuring that all contributors have the opportunity to participate, no matter the size or type of institution. It is about leveling the playing field by providing the tools and other support services that will allow content providers with limited resources the ability to be a partner in this venture. For the Our Ontario team, it’s about working with the community of contributors to enable digital content to be searchable and discoverable by end-users.
The user is also a participant
User-centred discovery and engagement is the benchmark for delivery of our services to end-users. Our Ontario services aim to provide an interactive experience for our digital generation users.
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History
Our Ontario is one of the foundational projects, and was first defined as the “Memory” project when Knowledge Ontario, originally termed the Ontario Digital Library, came into being.
“‘The Memory Project’ will provide easy access to electronic collections through the development of a unique centralized gateway to digitized local history and special focus collections from libraries, archives and museums across Ontario. This project will allow Ontarians to easily find collections that will meet their needs for scholarly and genealogical research, to find out more about Ontario and its communities and to locate specialized collections that may have previously been known only to local citizens and students.”
The Ontario Digital Library Business Plan, October 20, 2003
Check out our first search interface!
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