Knowledge Ontario Ideas

Brian As usual, great, provocative questions. re 1) 211 is working very well in Windsor with the library and community organizations. Access to services is better than with the predecessor information and referral agency which had to resort to imposing fees for services such as custom guides and broadcast fax. All now provided free with great quality. 2) OurOntario ... as the political scene calms, we are going to make better use of OurOntario. The local museum and archives (much more conservative than libraries) are watching us and have expressed following suit to use. They want us to try first and be their local resource. Larger scale communications are always hard to manage... 3) Looking to leadership growing out of the Knowledge Ontario umbrella ... it is a huge conceptual leap to herd the library cats into one arena. Brian...you???

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Just some random thoughts to stir some further discussion: 1) Where is our connection with Community Information Centres throughout the province? If we're in the 'Connecting' business then it would behoove us to reach out to these struggling groups. They get no government operating funding and yet have received over $13 million to implement the 211 service in Ontario. I won't go into the horrible politics going on in that sector at the moment - but I can say that they need our help and an alliance with the library community. The Portal concept would be an ideal way to feature access to their excellent databases. 2) Speaking of connections, I don't think that we're getting our message through as clearly as possible to the Archives, Genealogical and Museum communities in Ontario. OurOntario.ca is making excellent inroads at the individual level - but at the collective level our efforts are misunderstood and there is still a great deal of suspicion, I'm sure... How can we build a stronger cross-sector alliance? 3) How do we take our suite of various modules to a new level and design a blended architecture that is more seamless? How do we work toward a common user record for Ontario? The idea of one person/one card is still appealing. With the work of Bibliocmmons focussing on the end user and NOT the end organization and with the movement toward a possible (and optional) provincial ILS system for those libraries who wish to participate, we have the best chance yet to design the 'union database of users' that all of our various modules rely on and which would expedite ILS, authentication for commercial databases, etc...