Saturday, April 7, 2012

OGS Receives Trillium Grant for Phase 2 of Digitization Project


The Ontario Genealogical Society is pleased to announce that we have been granted funding by the Ontario Trillium Foundation to begin Phase 2 of our Keeping and Valuing Ontario’s Heritage Project. The funding consists of $156,000 over two years and will allow us to continue to assist Ontario heritage organization in scanning their materials and making them available to researchers.

 Phase 1 began in Fall 2008 with the aim to do the following:
  • provide a digitized version of one-of-a-kind records, increasing security
  • allow small organizations access to digitizing services they otherwise could not afford
  • increase access to records significant to Ontario's heritage
  • allow an income stream to heritage organizations if they wish
Since then we have successfully joined with several Ontario heritage organizations to digitize their records and make them available online through a revenue generating program. We have launched a beta version of The Ontario Name Index (TONI) as the main access point to the Pay-Per-View database. The information available through Pay-Per-View allows access to the history of the people of this province.

Phase 2 seeks to continue to support the preservation of Ontario heritage materials through digitization by adding to the data available on this system and expanding our affiliations to include new heritage organizations. 

We will improve and expand on TONI while creating new indexing systems where necessary.

We will also create and launch a more user friendly search interface for TONI and Pay- Per-View to ensure that researchers can find and access their information with ease.


OGS gratefully acknowledges the Ontario Trillium Foundation for their strong support of this project and appreciates their ongoing efforts to support the growth and vitality of communities across the province of Ontario.



To go to the website of the Ontario Genealogical Society, click on www.ogs.on.ca