City of Ottawa Archives and Ottawa Museums Go Virtual with their Collections

The City of Ottawa and the Ottawa Museum Network have partnered to create the Ottawa Museums and Archives Collections (OMAC), which is fully accessible, bilingual and simple to use. The online collection contains digitized records of archival records and artifacts, with full colour images where available, from a variety of local institutions including the Bytown, the City of Ottawa Archives, Diefenbunker, Goulbourn, Osgoode Township, Muséoparc Vanier and the City of Ottawa.

This project will play a significant role in the local community by providing the public easy access to the history of Ottawa and its people through these digitized records. The catalogue allows for many records to be viewed that could not have otherwise been put on display given their current condition. There are over 34,000 active records on the website, and new records will be uploaded once a month.

The site gives the public many options for searching: the entire online collection, author, time period, material type, institution, browsing the featured items, and many more. Each catalogue entry contains a description and a substantial amount of information, which may include a date, manufacturer, measurements, location, and other information related to the record, photograph or artifact.

The Friends of the City of Ottawa Archives, in accordance with our mission to foster public awareness of the City of Ottawa Archives services, encourage you to check out what can happen when museums and archives come together to share resources and collaborate on a massive undertaking such as this. Where else can you view a basket made from an armadillo? Visit the website to discover it: ottawa.minisisinc.com