A Community Digitizing Project In Northern Ontario
Along the Shore Line
Article/Photos by Mauricio Flores
CDP Technician Linda Williamson scans a scrapbook page from the Schreiber Public Library archive collection.
TERRACE BAY/SCHREIBER/NIPIGON, ON – For the past two months, the public libraries in Terrace Bay, Nipigon and Schreiber, as well as the Schreiber Railroad Museum, the Schreiber Historical Society and the Heritage and Tourism Committee, have come together in a partnership called Along the Shore Line with the intention of migrating their archives material into digital form. This Community Digitization Project, or CDP for short, provides new technologies in order to make archived material available to the general public in an effort to bring the history of our local townships out of the archive rooms and into the Internet. The CDP provides local job opportunities and the possibility for researchers, far beyond these towns, to access and learn about the history, development, economy and attractions of the region and of its people.
The resources for the CDP are managed by Our Ontario, a service of Knowledge Ontario, in conjunction with the partners in the area, thanks to a 15 million dollar grant from the Ministry of Culture through Southern Ontario Library Service (SOLS) and Ontario Library Service-North (OLSN) with the objective of helping Ontario communities preserve their cultural assets, disseminate their history and to make it available on-line.
The CDP project is now in its third and last phase, coming to an end in December 2011. By then, the CDP will leave its partners with equipment, software and trained digitizing technicians who will have all the necessary means to carry on digitizing and make it an on-going, non-stop project, as history and records will certainly continue to surface well after 2011.
To date, the collection put forth by the participants of the Along the Shore Line partnership includes a wide variety of objects, scrapbooks, audio cassettes, videos, photographs, old negatives and printed material pertaining to the region’s history, such as chronicles of the town of Jackfish, documents about the beginnings of Terrace Bay, and a comprehensive history of Nipigon and Schreiber. The amount of material is enough to keep busy the group of five digitizing technicians for a long time, so the project is expected to go on, but it is also important for the CDP to invite people in the community to participate in this initiative by bringing some of their personal collections to be digitized and displayed on the Internet. There are no specific dates determined so far for public digitizing sessions, as the project has only recently started; however, the partners will put out the word in the coming months when Along the Shore Line is ready to digitize material from members of the community.
While the results of the efforts made by the Along the Shore Line partners will be informative for anyone who has lived or visited these townships, for technicians it will be undoubtedly gratifying to see their efforts give the community the opportunity to get to know its history through reviewing on-line copies of primary sources. If you are interested or would like more information about the Community Digitization Project, visit www.knowledgeontario.ca (KOsolutions/OurOntario) or come visit us directly in the library archives, get involved and be on the look out for community digitizing days!!
CDP Technician Linda Williamson scans a scrapbook from the Schreiber Public Library archive collection.
