Owen Ketcheson of Centre Hastings township, Ontario, has more than 500 documents, including photographs from the 19th century, handwritten notes scribbled by his forebears and century-old wedding invitations. Now, thanks to Knowledge Ontario's Community Digitization Project, or CDP, anybody from anywhere in the world is able to browse Ketcheson's extensive historical archive, as long as they have an Internet connection. That's because he submitted it to be scanned and uploaded online at the Tweed Public Library, an institution selected to participate in the program.
The CDP is the result of a $15-million grant from the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Culture to the Southern Ontario Library Services and Ontario Library Services North. The project began in August 2009 after Our Ontario, the section of Knowledge Ontario that's running the program, chose to work with 30 public libraries and 20 other community organizations from across the province, said Our Ontario project co-ordinator Jess Posgate. The organization then sent digitization experts to guide the various institutions in their efforts to make their historical archives available online.
You can read more in an article by Alex Ballingall in the Ottawa Citizen at http://goo.gl/UebXT
