Online newspaper collections vary a lot depending on the original material, the date range, and how well the content has been processed or indexed for searching. This session will walk you through what’s available via ODW’s newspaper collections. It will include search tips, capturing your results, and how to contribute to local history collections for everyone’s benefit.
31. Specialty Sites
• Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario
• Ontario Genealogical Society
• Archives of the of Roman Catholic
Archdiocese of Toronto (ARCAT)
• Six Nations Public library Digital Archive
• Abolitionist Newspapers
32. Beyond Ontario
• Great Lakes Maritime History
– Great Lakes Ships
– Maritime History of the Great Lakes
• Illinois Newspapers – Chicago Area
Collections
vitacollections.ca/illinoisnews
• See all VITA Toolkit sites at
vitatoolkit.ca/collections
We are a not-for-profit organization
Our tools and services connect people and their communities around digital stories and objects
Our search and discovery tools provide free public access to hundreds of community collections
Today I want to use our three main portals and we’ll get a quick introduction to some of the specialty sites
Feel free to follow along if you have your computer and ask questions as we go.
I can also make these slides available after the presentation so you have a guide and all the links.
OurOntario.ca portal – our flagship portal that aggregates Ontario content of all kinds and from different sources
Ontario Community News – all our VITA Toolkit user newspaper collections, including full page scans and index records
OurDigitalWorld Newspapers -- a sister portal with mainly south-western Ontario newspaper collections
As well, we work with a number of organizations outside of Ontario which I will highlight at the end
Local history content from and about Ontario
Includes more than 3 million records from 200+ contributors:
Oral histories
Photographs
Scrapbooks
Yearbooks
3D collections
Women’s Institute documents
Newspaper pages & indexes
And more content every day…
The OurOntario site is a great resource for finding far-reaching results for your family history searches. It will include not only newspapers and genealogical records but cemetery records, ship manifests, city directories and more.
Let’s see what kinds of results you might find and how to navigate between them:
Of course you can Search across everything…
Keyword Search e.g. “Maracle”
Keyword search will bring back all instances of the search term
I call this the “wide end of the funnel”
To narrow those results,
Use the facets on right panel to scope search results to relevant items:
Location, year, item type, etc.
Or, if you have a more specific result in mind,
use advanced search for more specific terms or full name; use logic or field searches;
scope by collection contributor;
geographic location;
and choose which media types you want returned.
Investigate reduced results by clicking on item image
Contributor collection record will give more details;
some index records have scans or full text transcriptions
Others, though, do not have much more than the index title and the contributor can be contacted
Or, might be linked to a live digital page you can click on to see the item in context
Use your browser back button to return to the original results set
Keep in mind that an un-scoped search might return other types of documents or resources – and these can be equally useful…
Sometimes, these will come from other, external sources, and behave slightly differently e.g. Canadiana online
When you link to one of these records, you step out and into a new space where the object is hosted.
Search again to find the keyword instance in that object.
Then, use your browser back button to return to your results.
If you are interested specifically in Ontario newspapers, this site is one of the largest in the world
The Ontario Community Newspaper Portal is an aggregate site -- a one-search place – that brings together all Ontario newspaper content from libraries, historical societies, archives, museums, genealogical societies, and private collections in VITA collections
This includes a recent addition from Dryden Oshawa and Port Perry
More than 200 years of community newspapers 1810s<
80+ publications from across Ontario:
News articles
Births, Marriages and Deaths (BMDs)
Clippings
Full page/issue access
Primary resources from libraries, historical societies, archives, museums, genealogical societies, and private collections
Use the keyword or advanced search options to broaden or narrow your search;
This site offers other options for searching and browsing specific fields:
browse by location (top 100) and
browse by last name (alphabetic for index records)
Use the facets on the results to further reduce the number of results.
The results appears much like the OurOntario site, but have some extra facets including:
By Publication – a list of groups of Issues or indexing by Publication
Subjects – linked terms added during indexing.
Or, scope your search with the options on Advanced Search
Unless the search is scoped ahead of time, you are searching hundreds of thousands of index records, scanned articles PLUS billions of words from newspaper pages.
Your results sets will return a mix of these, with “relevance” being the default sort term (this can be changed in the facet panel).
You can also “X” out of a search scope for immediate expand your results
Some index records are part of larger digital collections and will have digitized pages linked to them. Click on the Linked page image to browse the page to find the item.
If no page has been assigned to the index record, you might need to browse the issue or click through and search the issue to find your item.
When you are returned a full text result, you can mouse-over the pages/parts links to see OCR snippet where search term has been found. This can help you determine the context and whether or not the result is relevant to your search needs.
Click on the snippet or linked Page number to arrive on the page; Click on the issue thumbnail to go to the issue itself (You can search again within the tissue)
Click through on the page/part link to arrive on the digital page and, for most collections, your terms will be highlighted in red.
You can download a PDF version of the page and save it or snip the relevant article for your files.
Any other “hits” for the term in that issue will be linked at the top of the screen.
Note the misspelling of Miss in the article – which is why fuzzy searching is so important!
Also remember that not all of the searchable full text will be “correct”, never mind “good”. This can be either because of the technology used to recognize the text in those pages or the state of the papers that were digitized.
If you know the region and a close date range for your search, sometimes it’s worth approaching the collection by searching for the publication title, almost like searching for items that are hand written. Then browse the pages.
There will usually be a pattern in the issues where BMDs are listed in a publication, and you’ll start seeing that after a few issues.
Or use the “About our newspaper collections” to see a list of significant regional coverage and their date ranges.
If you don’t see the region you’re looking for in those lists, we have some other titles – mainly from southwestern Ontario – in the INK Newspaper portal
More than 1 million pages of community newspapers 1810-2016
Mainly South-Western Ontario publications with full page/issue access
Use the simple or (click) advanced search
Results will return with linked title and snippet of the first instance of your keyword(s) on the page image.
Use the filters on the side panel to reduce your results
Click through to see the full page – light purple highlights show the found instances of the keyword.
Use the tools panel to print or bookmark this page or navigate to other terms or areas on the screen.
Remember: this is a pilot site and while the content is stable, these tools are often under development.
Family histories rarely have one location; search our other sites to discover migrations or relatives outside Ontario’s boundaries
Our extensive marine history sites are other gold mines of names and patterns of movement through the Great Lakes
Other sites of particular interest to this group might include the FWIO collections and OGS online collections
Family histories rarely have one location; search our other sites to discover migrations or relatives outside Ontario’s boundaries
Our extensive marine history sites are other gold mines of names and patterns of movement through the Great Lakes
Some organizations realize their records are incomplete and will ask the public to help.
We’ve found that genealogists provide the most prolific answers!
Mystery questions appear at the tops of the record or will be demarcated in results sets with a questions mark
Respond to mystery questions or add a comment using the comments tab
Here you will also find other responses.
All public responses become full text searchable so by adding your information, you enhance the search and discovery for that record i.e. the response here re: Grey cup and in the second: regimental numbers and a brother’s name.
Or, discover other personal links to collection items that might connect you with other people on the same quest
Any site with a “Share your story” or similarly titled link is inviting community contributions to their collections.
Use the advanced search or follow links to see what others have contributed.
Use the collection options to gather items for your own use and sharing your discoveries
On the results screen, Use the “Web tools” to subscribe to a set of results. You will be alerted when new results are added.
Share things you’ve found, either results or items, by using the social media icons on the top navigation bar. What you share will link people right back to what you found.
Once at the record level, most items will have an option to Login to My favourites
My favourites lets you privately collect items from across ODW-hosted collections.
Add notes and tags, save items randomly or set up specific collections to organize them