BC History Digitization Program – 2025 Projects

BC NDP History Working Group

$7477.14

The BC NDP provided party members with a periodic, typically monthly, print publication between 1961 and 2014. “The Democrat” provided readers with detailed information on public policy issues, NDP perspectives on these issues, and commentary from party members, officials and elected MLA’s and MP’s.

City of Vancouver Archives

$15,000

This first phase of the project focuses on prominent dimensions of Sid Chow Tan’s activism: justice for the Chinese Canadian community, through work with the Head Tax redress movement; resistance to gentrification and displacement in Vancouver’s Chinatown and Downtown Eastside; and environmental justice in British Columbia and beyond.

Clayoquot Biosphere Trust Society

$7941

In the early-mid 1980s, Nuu-chah-nulth and settler residents of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound region began resisting clear-cut logging that was a dominant driver of the BC economy. While people needed jobs, they also knew the destruction of precious Indigenous old growth rainforest could not continue. The Clayoquot Archive Digitization Project will result in a highly unique, impactful primary source to add depth to historical understandings.

Kaatza Station Museum and Archives

$12,325

This is Phase 3 of a digitization project that will make all I.W.A. newspapers held by the Kaatza Historical Society available online through the Arca digital repository. The stories captured in newspapers produced by local union offices offer key insights into the labour movement and are all fully arranged and described in our archives.

Metlakatla First Nation

$2129.96

Metlakatla First Nation has approximately 100 cassette tapes of various sizes to be preserved. The significance of the tapes includes material that demonstrates historical changes, patterns, and important speakers.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

$3410.40

With a focus on the Canadian and BC avantgarde, Vancouver’s post-war art history and emerging local artists, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Belkin Gallery) holds one of the largest public collection of art in the province with this focus. The Belkin will digitize 94 two-dimensional works housed onsite in the Gallery’s frame storage, including paintings, drawings, collages and photographs created by a wide variety of BC artists. The work in the collection ranges in date from the eighteenth century to the present and is the valuable research resource to curators, artists, students, academics and the general public.

Nelson Museum, Archives and Gallery

$7781

The project is to digitize the pages of sixteen years and nine months of the Nelson Daily News newspaper from January 1, 1986 to June 30, 2003 and will be hosted on the UBC Historical Newspapers Open Collections website. The Nelson Daily News is a hugely significant resource for researching the history of Nelson and the wider Kootenay region. The newspaper’s network of more than 40 correspondents provided news from dozens of communities across the Kootenays.

Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre

$15,000

Tomoni: Living with Ability, Atsu’s Story is the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre’s 2025-2026 digitization project which will make accessible the significant materials donated by the Uyeda family estate. Spanning the 1930s to 2010s, the materials depict the family’s navigation of medical and social service systems in acquiring care, equipment, and accessibility accommodations for their children with physical and intellectual disabilities.

Simon Fraser University Library

$12,000

This project will digitize and make available 761 items from the BC-based content in the David Yorke Labour History Collection. These vivid and significant items, which include dues buttons, membership pins, delegate badges, convention ribbons, memorial pins, shop cards, and union constitutions/bylaws, serve as a witness to and documentation of the labour movement.

Sointula Museum and Historical Society

$3168

The Sointula Museum and Historical Society will digitize and publish 58 issues comprised of 318 pages of the Finnish weekly newsletter Aika. The articles document the historical, social, cultural, and economic history of British Columbia.

South Asian Studies Institute

$14,961.36

This project aims to digitize, preserve, and provide open access to 10,000 selected photographs from the Chandra Bodalia fonds. Bodalia fonds consists of over three million photographs that document Bodalia’s legendary career as a photojournalist in British Columbia (BC) from the 1980s to 2017.

Stó:lō Library and Archives

$15,000

The Sqwelqwels Digitization Project will digitize approximately 46cm of textual records of community-based newsletters intermittently generated from mid 1970’s to mid 2010’s. These newsletters were generated to keep the Stó:lō communities informed on various ongoing issues of importance, such as the Treaty process, political changes, employment, child and family services, archaeology, and major life events of community members.

S.U.C.C.E.S.S.

$4726

The Digitization of S.U.C.C.E.S.S. Evergreen News aims to digitize 132 issues of the Evergreen News – S.U.C.C.E.S.S.’s monthly newsletter written in Traditional Chinese and published in print spanning the years from 1985 to 1995. The Evergreen News (松鶴天地 – cong4 hok3 tin1 dei6/sōng hè tiān dì), documents the economic, historical, and sociocultural richness of Chinese- Canadians in British Columbia.

Swedish Heritage in British Columbia

$3486

Swedish Heritage in British Columbia (SHBC) works to preserve, document, and record the history of Swedes, and people of Swedish heritage, who settled in BC and helped shape the province. The second phase of this project, SHBC will digitize a further  770 broadsheet editions published between 1955-1985.

UBC Herbarium, Beaty Biodiversity Museum

$15,000

The UBC Herbarium, Beaty Biodiversity Museum will image and make available historically important plant specimens, notes and letters of botanist, entomologist and British Columbia’s plant pathologist, John. W. Eastham (1878-1968), as his life’s work in British Columbia (1914-1968) has a profound impact on our understanding of BC early flora and agriculture.

Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre

$15,000

This second part of the project builds on the initial digitization of the Peter Oberlander Collection and will expand to include new family materials in an ongoing effort to preserve and make accessible the Oberlander family’s historical and cultural legacy. The collection is significant for both Holocaust education and British Columbia’s history. The materials within the collection provide insight into the personal experiences of Peter Oberlander, his wife Cornelia Hahn-Oberlander, and their family history, highlighting aspects of British Columbia’s cultural and architectural heritage, alongside the lesser-known history of Jewish internment and refugee experiences in Canada.

VIVO Media Arts

$2909

Dance and the Video Mirror: The Matthew Speier Fonds will digitize 74 Master videotapes recorded between 1973 and 1978 by Vancouver artist and educator Matthew Speier (1937-2022). The recordings art part of Matthew Speier’s Dance-Video Canada project (1973-1976) and showcase the experimental impulses of the 1970s’ contemporary dance choreographers and one early adopter of portable video technology.

Western Front

$3826.44

Western Front will digitization of 41 films, created predominantly by founder and feminist video pioneering artist, Kate Craig. The films document performance art history and animation works produced at Western Front, including works that have not been previously accessible, and footage of Vancouver and sites in British Columbia in the 1970s and 1980s.