BC History Digitization Program – 2021 Projects

Barkerville Historic Town & Park

$13,835

The Barkerville, BC Historic Maps Digitization project will digitize the first 2000 of over 5000 maps, posters, architectural drawings blueprints and other historically significant artefacts in Barkerville’s archives, spanning over 150 years.

BC Society for the Museum of Original Costume (SMOC)

$2000

Lore Maria Wiener (31 March 1920 – 16 July 2019) is one of the primary contributors to Vancouver’s reputation of excellence in fashion design. This project will digitize 100 photographs of her fashions (often taken against a backdrop of Vancouver landmarks) and 80 pages of marketing materials promoting her haute couture boutique in Vancouver’s Kerrisdale  neighbourhood. It will constitute a significant contribution to the history of fashion in Vancouver and provide an invaluable resource for scholars, collectors, contemporary designers, museums, galleries, and film/theatre productions.

City of Vancouver Archives

$2,000

The Steffens-Colmer Studios and Don Coltman Company Photographs Digitization Project (Phase Two) will digitize 5,000 photographic negatives taken by Don Coltman between 1941 and 1953 in the course of his work at Steffens-Colmer Studios and Don Coltman Company.

Italian Cultural Centre Museum (Il Museo)

$6,720

This project will digitize photographs, meeting minutes, event programs, and event posters from the Ray Culos Vancouver Society of Italians Collection, specifically content related to the activities of the Sons of Italy from 1926-1966. The Sons of Italy was one of Vancouver’s main Italian mutual aid societies in the early 20th century. This content offers insight into its governance structure and activities in support of both recent and established Italian immigrants in Canada. The digital files and descriptive metadata will be made available online through both the Italian Cultural Centre Society’s website and the SFU Library website.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (The University of British Columbia)

$13,000

Offsite: BC Art in Storage will digitize 77 works of art by BC artists currently in offsite storage, allowing the Belkin to provide online access to important works in our collection that are otherwise not regularly accessible.

Museum of Vancouver

$15,000

The Vancouver Recreational Artefacts Digitization Project will digitize 1870 artefacts related to recreation in Vancouver ranging in date from the late 1800s to present day. Recreational artefacts include games, toys, sports equipment, recreational devices (ex. pinball machine), and public entertainment devices (ex. puppets).

Nikkei National Museum

$14,445

Families on the Coast: The Madokoro Collections is a continuation of our successful 2019-2020 digitization project, Families on the Coast: K&M Boat Works and the Oikawa Island. With continued support from the Madokoro families, two new accruals were received and accessioned into the museum’s archives. 1541 graphic materials, 4.5cm of textual records, 3 objects, and 8 – 8mm/Super 8mm films are ready to be digitized and made accessible online. Spanning the years 1910 to 1982 these records capture BC’s fishing industry in Tofino, Steveston, and Prince Rupert, as well as the forced removal and internment of Japanese Canadians in BC.

Prince Rupert Public Library

$6570

The Prince Rupert Library will be digitizing its “Turning the Pages” digital newspaper collection of the Prince Rupert Daily News for the years from 1955 to 2009. The first 43 years of the collection, from 1911 to 1954 have already been successfully digitized.

Simon Fraser University English Department

$8,275.83

This project will digitize 206 audio recordings held in SFU Special Collections & Rare Books, primarily the Contemporary Literature Collection, including the Fred Wah fonds, the Women and Words fonds, the Daphne Marlatt fonds, and the Filling Station fonds, among others. These tapes give voice to poets from underrepresented or marginalized positions and feature unconventional poetic forms.

Société historique francophone de la Colombie-Britannique

$5,402

The Société historique francophone de la Colombie-Britannique will digitize 32,000 pages from 87 publications of 38 Francophone organizations in 13 B.C. cities, from the 1960s to the present.

South Asian Studies Institute, University of the Fraser Valley

$9,978

The forthcoming South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (SACDA) is a digital repository that partners with organizations, individuals, families, and repositories to digitize, preserve, and provide access to heritage materials that hold significance for South Asian Canadians. The first phase of digitization will see over five thousand photographic prints and negatives of studio sittings with South Asian families taken from 1956 until 2000 in Abbotsford, as well as a small fonds of textual records and textiles from Baltej Singh Dhillon, the first RCMP officer to successfully challenge the RCMP to wear a turban in uniform.

Summerland Museum and Archives Society

$2,287

This project will digitize and provide online access to approximately 1100 issues or 11,000 pages of searchable content from microfilmed copies of the Summerland Review (1946-1967). The resulting digital files will be made available on both the Museum’s website and as part of the B.C. Regional Digitized History portal (bcrdh.ca) newspaper collection on BCELN’s Arca platform.

The Reach Gallery Museum Abbotsford (Abbotsford Cultural Centre)

$14,980

The South Asian in the Valley Digitization Project (SAVDP) will complement The Reach’s work to represent the more than 100-year history of Abbotsford’s South Asian community. SAITVP will see the digitization of collections of photographs and documents, and accompanying descriptive metadata loaned by local South Asian families during exhibition research conducted in 2020 and 2021 made available online. It will add a layer of personal narratives to the community history that will be made available online when the Punjabi Patrika Digitization Project (in progress) is completed to provide a rich and comprehensive resource South Asian history in the Fraser Valley.

Touchstones Nelson: Museum of Art and History (Nelson and District Museum, Archives, Art Gallery and Historical Society)

$7,380

The project is to digitize over eleven and a half years of the Nelson Daily News newspaper from May 1, 1936 to December 31, 1947. 35 microfilm Master reels of the newspaper will be loaned from BC Archives. The information on these reels will be digitally scanned by the UBC Library Digitization Centre. The digital collection will be hosted on the UBC Historical Newspapers Open Collections website.

University of British Columbia Okanagan Campus Library (The University of British Columbia)

$5,159

This project will digitize and provide online access to 539 issues or 8,520 pages of searchable content from print copies of the Kootenay Express (1988-2000). The resulting digital files will be made available as part of the B.C. Regional Digitized History portal (bcrdh.ca) Kootenay-Columbia newspaper collection on BCELN’s Arca platform.

University of the Fraser Valley Library (University of the Fraser Valley)

$563.15

The University of the Fraser Library plans to digitize the 1946 year of the Abbotsford, Sumas, & Matsqui News (ASMN) as the third phase of this ongoing project. For this phase, approximately 520 scanned pages will be made from 52 weekly issues. The digital products will include 520 TIFF master digital files, 52 searchable multi-page PDFs, and accompanying XML metadata and OCR text files. This will result in an estimated 12 GB of digital files. The content will be added to the existing ASMN website (https://ufv.arcabc.ca/asmn/) containing 1922-1938. The 1939-1945 years will be added on January 1, 2021 as they enter public domain.

University of Victoria Libraries (University of Victoria)

$13,203

‘A Leading Influence’: Significant Architectural Works of Alan Hodgson will digitize approximately 3000 large-scale drawings, architectural plans, and fragile conceptual sketches of British Columbia architect Alan Hodgson, a well-known contributor to the architectural legacy of Victoria, and a pioneer of the West Coast Style. In addition to this, we will employ an archival intern on a short-term contract to assist with description and the creation of a finding aid so that the Hodgson materials can be fully searchable and cross-indexed online with our other digital collections and in our local search engine.

Victoria West Athletic Association

$2,901.71

The Vic West Athletic Association (est 1896) turns 125 next year and will be celebrating this anniversary by creating a digital archive of 125 years of pictures and documents that will preserve the rich and treasured history of the association.

VIVO Media Arts Centre (Satellite Video Exchange Society)

$3,000

Paul Wong: Vancouver Art & Culture Documentation, 1973-1985, will digitize 40, thirty-minute ½” open reel and ¾” U-Matic videotapes recorded by Vancouver artist, Paul Wong. These videos document Vancouver’s Chinatown, Chinese Canadian culture, Downtown and East Side art, punk, and New Wave scenes, activities at Helen Goodwin’s Performance Warehouse on Granville Island, and Wong and the Mainstreeters early performance art events and happenings.