Ontario Digitization Initiative: Moving Forward Thorough Collaboration.

Today's academic institutions face a number of pressing problems such as the eternal dilemma of dimishing records space and the more modern difficulty of providing digital copies of their holdings. Many members of the academic community increasingly are embracing electronic format for materials due to ease of use, storage, and data manipulation. It is in this light that the creation of the Ontario Digitalization Initiative should be considered. In 2008 the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), working in collaboration with associated partners, established the Ontario Digitialization Initiative (ODI) to embark on an ambitious project to mass digitize and make freely available the estimated 50 million pages of Ontario government documents in existence. Since that time, over 1 million pages have been digitized and the ODI continues to work towards its goal. This session will provide insight into the planning, partnerships and challenges in handling a mandate of this magnitude. We will reveal what has been accomplished, what obstacles have been overcome and what barriers still remain as we develop our plans for the future. While the praise from government officials has been uniformly quite enthusiastic and supportive of this project, we hope to begin making headway in securing significant funding from government and other sources in the coming year. Given the current economic climate, it will take great ingenuity, collaboration and support to reach our goal.