Help users discover your digital collections via OurOntario.ca.

Our Ontario is a free discovery service for organizations – libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, heritage and community groups, government agencies, art galleries… - providing an avenue for making digital content discoverable to a global audience.

Why Contribute?

• A unique opportunity to globally market your digital collections and increase public discovery.
• Provide better access to your collections.
• Contributing to OurOntario.ca (the portal discovery service) ensures that your collections will be available through other regional, national and international mega-portals.
• Benefit from the collaboration and sharing of expertise and resources.
  

What’s included in OurOntario.ca?

• The digital resources included in 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 portal includes Ontario content from collections in other parts of the country.
• 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.
• Digital resources available on OurOntario.ca must be in the public domain, or must adhere to Canadian copyright regulations.

How it works

Discovery of Digital Collections
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.

For a user to find information about your collections, we need to include metadata (information about the digital object/collection such as title, description, creator, date, etc…) that allows for consistent searching, and a persistent URL to create the link for a user to access your collections. 

When a user visits the OurOntario.ca portal, they will be able to search your records. We also can export the metadata records into many different formats (such as Dublin Core, MODS, METS, etc.), which means that once you make your digital records available within the context of OurOntario.ca, your records also become available in many different ways, exposing your data to a greater number of end-users for discovery, search and retrieval.

Steps in contributing your content

1. The first step is to let us know about your digital content.  Go to http://registry.ourontario.ca and fill out the short form (it doesn’t matter if you don’t have answers to all of the questions). We will contact you for follow-up.
2. You will be asked to export your metadata from your local system, and send them to us along with the website address to the digital collections.  For more information, contact us at info@ourontario.ca.

Tools for Digital Collections
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.

Web-based forms that collect metadata (administrative and descriptive information) about digital objects, including text, images, sound and video are freely available for use by contributors. Metadata ensures that your digital resources will be discoverable and searchable by end-users.

We offer two types of software – VITA and PICA.  VITA (Video, Images, Text, Audio) is a web-based software tool for creating and managing data about digital objects and digital collections.  Some of the VITA features and functionalities include:

• Secure access (log on, password)
• Different levels of access for managers, staff, and volunteers
• Templates
• Checklist of preferred values (for mapping geographic locations)
• Subjects, personal names, geographic names, creator and contributor roles
• linked to content standards thesauri and authorities
• Ability to edit (single record and groups)
• Ability to save work-in-progressAbility to choose when a record becomes publicly viewable
• Help features
• Photo essay tool

Most of the features are customizable – the VITA templates and the site are for the most part administered by the participating organization. Records created through VITA allow for online features, such as user comments, Google maps, slideshows, groups, links, etc… through the locally customized site that we create for you to display your digital collections, which includes search and browse functionalities. Records, once designated as publicly viewable, are displayed on your local site and are also automatically indexed and searchable via the OurOntario.ca portal.

To participate, you need to have access to the Internet, and you need to allow your browser to accept pop-ups.

Virtual training sessions on creating records using VITA and VITA site administration are offered on a monthly basis.

Click on the links below for a sample of websites hosted by us, displaying records created using VITA.
http://images.ourontario.ca/Brock
http://images.ourontario.ca/Cobourg
http://images.ourontario.ca/Muskoka
http://images.ourontario.ca/Orillia

PICA (Press Index for Community Access) is a web-based software tool for indexing and displaying newspapers and genealogical records.  Contact us for more details.