Written by: Monika Seymour Saturday, January 09, 2010
If you have visited our website recently, you may have noticed the icon for Knowledge Ontario or “KO” on the left side panel. We have displayed this hoping that some of our membership will click on it and send a “postcard of support” for this current advocacy campaign. The goal is to attain stable, multi-year funding for future long term planning and sustainability. The Ministry of Culture is the funding leader on this initiative.
What does it mean to you? Knowledge Ontario was established to provide a core set of programs and resources as a foundation for digital literacy and e learning for all residents of Ontario, and to enable everyone to be engaged in the “knowledge economy” of the future. Libraries have a central role in this, acting as the community hubs, for access and delivery of the digital content and resources. Cultural heritage organizations and educational institutions are also part of the collaborative effort to make it easy to connect to the collections and information.
Many of the databases available to you, on our website are made available through KO funding. Resource Ontario negotiates and pays for the licences for a core of the online database resources that are made available at no cost to all publicly funded libraries in the province. For most libraries today, this is the only reason they are able to sustain these databases. Individually, they could never continue to offer this service within their budgets, and small towns or First Nation libraries would likely never have had the ability to subscribe to online databases in the first place.
Our Ontario offers digital services and expertise to advance the sharing of Ontario culture, history and stories. It has facilitated the integrated access to digital collections of libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and community groups around the province and makes them available globally. Visit the site: www.ourontario.ca, and notice how our own NFPL digital collections are featured. Note – one of the support postcards to send comes from our collection. Can you identify it?
The January featured artist in our Rosberg gallery is Paul A. Augustino with a photo exhibit, “celebrating the beauty and wonder of Niagara”. The large scale photos are beautifully framed and displayed. The gallery is open during regular library hours.
Our “Exploring World Cinema” series continues on Sunday January 10 with the 1985 Oscar and BAFTA winning film, “Ran”, from Japan. The story centres on the Great Lord Hidetora Ichimonji and his 3 sons. Conspiracy and intrigue dominate as two of the sons plot to strip the father of his title. The presentation begins at 2pm in the LaMarsh Room. Rated AA.
Big Screen Tuesday on January 12th features the fantasy-adventure about a teenager who unknowingly breaks a 200-year-old truce between two warring factions of vampires. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, is based on the popular series of Young Adult books by Darren Shan. (Rated PG.)
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