OLITA Award for Technological Innovation 2008

Our Ontario Project Manager
Knowledge Ontario

OurOntario.ca is an impressive and ambitious undertaking to centralize access to the digital collections of this province's libraries, archives, museums and more. It is innovative in both its scope and its pursuit of providing a measure of regional search to a field dominated by large foreign corporations.
 
The OurOntario.ca portal is innovative in many ways:

• its ambitious scope (reaching across Canada to assemble digital objects pertinent to Ontarians) is without peer in the province
• its "if you love something, set it free" approach; while most searchable collections of digital objects strive to keep you in the context of their own site, OurOntario.ca rewards contributors by driving traffic to their sites; this is likely to encourage 
• its foundation of open source technology and contributions back to the library technology community set a standard of open collaboration to which I hope other projects will aspire in the future

OLITA has awarded OurOntario.ca portal as the OLITA Technological Award recipient for 2008 due to the scope of the project, its content recruitment approach, its foundation of open source technology, and its impact on Ontarians.