Presenters:
Brian Bell, Director of E-Services at Oakville Public Library
Peter Rogers, Chair of Knowledge Ontario
Session Description:
How will the recent $8 million Ontario government grant improve your library? How will it help you meet the future head on? Two members of the Knowledge Ontario (KO) (formerly Ontario Digital Library) management team shared insider info.
Reference Documents:
1. Ontario Digital Library Business Plan (available on OLA and KO websites)
2. Knowledge Ontario Business Case (not yet public; prepared for the government)
Overview of KO:·
The name has evolved from Ontario Digital Library to Knowledge Ontario, in order to remove library jargon and speak more directly to the government (who provide the project funding).
What is KO? It is a suite of programs and services designed to meet the information and learning needs of all Ontarions. It is the first ever collaboration of 6,500 university, college, public, school, and government libraries, promising equal availability and access to core digital information resources for all Ontarions. Importantly, KO is not trying to circumvent libraries, but rather attempt to deliver core digital resources to everybody.·
Knowledge Ontario has six modules:
1. Resource Ontario
2. Our Ontario (digital images)
3. Ask Ontario (24/7 reference)
4. Video Ontario
5. Teach Ontarians (skills module to help user and professional work within context of KO)
6. Connect Ontarians (newest and fuzziest part of project; originally intent was to identify quality resources, now incorporating social software)
Provincial Environment:
- 2005 Throne Speech outlined plans for ensuring Ontario’s success in a knowledge-based economy (where information is fundamental to economic success and technology is changing how we find and use that information)
- Bob Rae’s 2005 report on ON’s post-secondary education calls for a province-wide digital library
- Various from ServiceOntario to TelehealthOntario to ScholarsPortal reflect new realities
- The library sector invited the ON government to be a partner in establishing KO
Creating and Licensing Digital Content:
- Already have a system of haves and have-nots in province already: the Ontario library sector currently spends > $67.5M for digital resources, but is providing fragmented and inequitable levels of service.
- A strong base exists already in university, college, school, and public libraries
- KO will build upon this foundation and focus on 3 core areas, one being to align and leverage resources and services
- Small libraries will provide digital resources for the 1st time
- Licensing digital content: the province’s investment will fund the core service
- KO will be encouraging new levels of collaboration and making a wealth of information about Ontario broadly available for the 1st time
Some Costs
- Our Ontario: cost $3.5M over 5 years; more than 20,000 hours of manpower went into getting project off the ground
- Video Ontario: $1.0M over 4 years (pilot project)
- Ask Ontario: $13.2M over 5 years (much of it in-kind) (www.askontario.com)
- Connect Ontarians: $8.3M over 4 years (89% in-kind)
- Funding will be distributed across the 6 projects, with a significant % of estimated costs to be used towards purchasing digital content
More About Our Ontario:
- Provides seamless and integrated access to Ontario’s digital info resources
- Enhancing user access to digitized local history and special collections by bringing together dispersed material
- Promoting collaboration amongst various partners and organizations (including small public libraries, Early Canadiana, Images Canada, etc)
- User finding interface plus tool set
- KO will provide a search service which points the user to the local system where the content is housed (unless the contributors don’t have the means to store their own digital objects, in which case KO will host the content)
- Users want a Google-like search across all silos; a single-place to turn to for federated searching (local > regional > provincial > national)
- KO will act as a national aggregator and will further normalize the data
[Notetaker: Melanie Sellar]
