. Our Ontario is a collaborative project delivering integrated access to digital collections of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, galleries, and others. If you have digital content online …we make it easy for users to discover your unique collections. Through a meta-search, users can find a range of digital content from diverse contributing organizations.  Search results link users to the website (yours!) where users can access the digital collections.

The Our Ontario project is enabling communities to participate in the creation and delivery of digital content about Ontario by providing web-based tools. If you don’t have digital content, but would like to get your collections digitized and available online…we can provide the tool (s) and host your digital content on a locally branded site for you.  One of the key aims of OurOntario.ca is to assist contributors (libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, schools, and other cultural heritage and community groups) to digitize and manage collections.

We provide discovery services mainly via an online resource tool known as OurOntario.ca (http://www.ourontario.ca) - a portal to Ontario's digital collections - one place for users to discover, search, navigate and interact with digital content about and from Ontario. Text, audio, video and image digital materials about Ontario history, heritage and culture, of interest to researchers, students, genealogists, educators, information professionals and the general populace that has until now only been available locally is globally accessible and discoverable via the OurOntario.ca portal.
You can search thousands of digital resources available from a range of diverse cultural organizations without actually needing to know where the digital content is located.

Our Ontario project mission
The Mission of the Our Ontario component of Knowledge Ontario is to develop and enhance access to Ontario’s digital cultural content. We deliver a new model for how we create and make available digital content that will reduce barriers to and significantly improve access to Ontario’s history, heritage and culture by the citizens of the province. Guiding Principles of Implementation.

Scope of OurOntario.ca collections

• The digital resources available through the OurOntario.ca portal includes material about Ontario, or digital resources in the custody of libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, heritage and community groups, and from private collections in Ontario
• The subject matter of the digital resources accessible via OurOntario.ca is inclusive of all facets of Ontario life and culture, history, government, business and scientific heritage. OurOntario.ca also points to Ontario content from collections in other parts of the country.
• Digital resources available on OurOntario.ca are in the public domain, or comply with Canadian copyright regulations.
• Ownership of the digital resources available through or hosted by OurOntario.ca remains with the originating site or contributing institution.

How it works
The Portal - A meta-search layer to the user interface allows distributed digital collections from a range of institutions to be searched from one access point. For managed collections, OurOntario.ca harvests the metadata records held on the participating agency’s website. The metadata records are ingested, normalized and indexed on OurOntario.ca servers. Searches are conducted on our local copy of the metadata provided by the contributing partner.  The meta-search platform uses Cocoon, Lucene for indexing and Solr for faceting.  Our next development phase will focus on expanding the portal services to deliver digital content in an engaging and interactive manner, through use of social networking and other web 2.0 features.

The Toolkit – We set up an agency and site profiles for each organization, allowing access to and customization of web-based forms for creating and managing metadata records and associated digital files. The toolkit includes the hosting of a locally branded site that includes search and browse functionalities, and other interactive features.

Our goals

• Make digital content about Ontario history and culture discoverable
• Enable communities, large or small, to contribute to the creation and discovery of digital conten
• Transform the way in which users discover, search, navigate and interact with Ontario’s multimedia digital content
• Facilitate data exchange and partner with regional, provincial, national and international digital initiativesAct as a resource for digitization projects in the province of Ontario

Staff
Our Ontario project team members are:

• Loren Fantin, Project Manager
• Walter Lewis, Information Architect and Technical Lead
• Jess Posgate, Project Coordinator
• Tricia Williams, Portal Development

Committee
Our Ontario Steering Committee includes:

• Art Rhyno, former OLITA president, Systems Librarian, University of Windsor (Chair)
• Diane Bédard, former OLITA president, Supervisor, Learning Commons for Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board
• Brian Bell, former OLA president, Director of E-Services Development, Oakville Public Library
• Peter Ellinger, Manager, Library Technology. Applications, Ontario Legislative Library
• Walter Lewis, Manager, Support Services, Halton Hills Public Library

Contact

• Loren Fantin, Our Ontario Project Manager
  Knowledge Ontario
  Email: lfantin@knowledgeontario.ca
  Tel: 647 288-0254, ext. 42, or 1 888 537-1377
• Jess Posgate, Our Ontario Project Coordinator
  Knowledge Ontario
  Email: jposgate @ourontario.ca
  Tel: 647 288-0254, ext. 38, or 1 888 537-1377