BC History Digitization Program – 2022 Projects

Alder Grove Heritage Society

$4163.77

Digitization of 29 rolls of microfilm of The Aldergrove Star newspaper dated from 16 October 1957 to 31 December 1991. The digitized rolls will be made available on the UBC Historical Newspapers Collection for access by site users.

Alert Bay Public Library

$10,500

The Ronald E. Shuker project will digitize copies of his newspapers, The Bulletin and Pioneer Journal from 1939 to 1941. There are 186 pages from 21 issues. Alert Bay Public Library will also be digitizing 2500 photographs given by the Ronald E. Shuker family. These photos are from 1938 to 1960.

Armstrong Spallumcheen Museum and Arts Society

$2000

This project will digitize and provide online access to approximately 100 local broadcasts from S-VHS copies of SunCountry Cablevision North Okanagan Report (1994-1995). The resulting digital files will be made available on as part of the B.C. Regional Digitized History portal, specific to the Armstrong Spallumcheen Museum and Arts Gallery repository collection via BCELN’s Arca platform.

BC Forest Discovery Centre

$13,568

The project will digitize and provide online access to approximately 3,265 photographs. The goal is to make the collection, which is of vital importance to the study and understanding of our forestry heritage, accessible to scholars and the public. As well, digitization will help preserve the collection and aid in programming and exhibit development. A temporary exhibit will be produced showcasing “Collection Highlights”. This grant will enable the BC Forest Discovery Centre (BCFDC) to begin the first steps in the digitization of its collection.

BC Society for the Museum of Original Costume (SMOC)

$2318

The David Spencer department store in Vancouver has a sense of mission as a perceived pioneer in retail. Their motto was “As British Columbia Grows—We Grow”. The store’s order catalogues were mechanisms to reach the outlying districts of the Province by supplying lower middle-class consumer products. The catalogues were the principal vehicle to becoming “the mail order house of the west”.

SMOC will be digitizing the sections of three catalogues covering women’s, men’s, and children’s apparel and accessories for the years 1935, 1940 (unmarked but evidence would suggest this date) and 1942.

These section comprise 163 pages.

Beaty Biodiversity Museum

$4000

Various specimen collections of the UBC Beaty Biodiversity Museum (BBM) have accumulated highly valuable scientific drawings of their specimens and species from British Columbia over decades. The fish, insect, and plant collections have recovered and gathered 845 drawings that were made or commissioned by UBC employees up to 60 years ago. The collection will be digitized in order to archive and preserve the originals, while the scanned images will be used as illustrations in scientific and vulgarization publications, and in the BBM education and outreach activities, including displaying them in the museum public exhibition.

Centre for Socialist Education

$7990

The historic newspaper, The Pacific Tribune, was a consistent source of reporting and analysis of labour movements and people’s struggles in British Columbia. This project, in partnership between the Centre for Socialist Education (CSE) and the BC Labour Heritage Centre, will digitize and make publicly available through the Arca repository the weekly 44-year run of print editions from 1947-1990. This amounts to 44 bound volumes, 2,444 issues with approximately 25,000 pages in total.

City of Vancouver Archives

$15,000

This project will digitize 8,200 City of Vancouver Planning Department photographs taken as part of heritage inventories carried out between 1964 and 1977 (predominantly 1974). The project will include some metadata augmentation to ensure existing item-level metadata is RAD-compliant.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

$2609.50

Roy Kiyooka (1926-1994) was an interdisciplinary artist, working in photography, film, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry. The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery will digitize and provide access to 358 items from the Roy Kiyooka fonds that span and document decades of contributions to the arts in local and international contexts. This project surveys known and unknown literary and photographic works created by the artist. The project, Roy Kiyooka: Their ambiences remain virtually intact (a quote taken from his poetry in Pacific Windows, 1990), aims to provide new insight and opportunities to access these important works.

Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre

$14,500

The digitization of Tegami: Reaching Out Across Distance will make accessible the significant materials from the Eiji Yatabe Collection. Spanning 1924 to 2021, this family collection captures the experiences of Eiji and Kazuko Yatabe over the decades. Tegami, meaning “letter”, signifies the importance of the letters of correspondence written by numerous Japanese Canadians during the 1940s forced uprooting and dispossession. With continued support from the Yatabe family, 51.5 cm of textual records, 281 photographs, and 30 objects are ready to be digitized and made accessible online in commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Japanese Canadian Internment.

North Vancouver District Public Library

$12,000

The North Shore News is a treasured community resource and a strong, sustained voice for journalism locally-made in BC. The purpose of this project, coordinated by North Vancouver District Public Library, is to establish a shared resource to access locally created news and advertising collections.

This initial phase of the Digital Preservation and Access of North Shore Newspapers project, undertaken by three North Shore library systems, will digitize 24 years of the North Shore News by scanning/digitizing issues of the newspaper from 1976 to 2000 from microfilm/ microfiche and making them publicly available at no cost on the BCELN’s ARCA platform.

Selkirk College Library

$4650

The West Kootenay Newspaper digitization project will digitize the Selkirk College Library’s microfilm collection of the Rossland Evening Record (1897-1900), Castle News (1947-1956), Castlegar News (1956-1993) and the Castlegar Sun (1990-1995). Approximately 43,200 pages will be scanned from 2,860 issues and the resulting digital files will be made available through the Selkirk College Arca repository SCOLR.

Simon Fraser University Library

$6150

This project will digitize 99 volumes (7755 pages) of the proceedings of the Doukhobor Expanded Kootenay Committee on Intergroup Relations (EKCIR) and will make the digital files and accompanying descriptive metadata available online through the SFU Library’s website. The material, held by the Library’s Special Collections and Rare Books division, documents the process of Doukhobor intergroup reconciliation from 1982-1989.

Tofino Clayoquot Heritage Society

$2932

The Artifact Digitization project will digitize 54 artifacts from the Dorothy Arnet collections within the Tofino Clayoquot Heritage Museum (TCHM). As part of this project, the Tofino Clayoquot Heritage Society will write blog posts and host open or virtual sessions for public access. Examples of the types of objects in this collection include a nail retrieved from the first house built in Tofino, part of a red brick collected from the site of Fort Defiance (1791-92), handmade model ships, oil lamp, binoculars, tools, fishing gear. Also in the collection are photographs and pencil drawings, which are ca. 1900 – 1930.

Touchstones Nelson: Museum of Art and History

$5641.82

The project will digitize the Nelson Daily News newspaper from January 1, 1948 to April 30, 1959. 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.

UNIT/PITT Society for Art and Critical Awareness

$6554.50

UNIT/PITT seeks to digitise and make publicly available 11 cassettes of recordings of panel discussions that took place during “Strategies for Survival: State of the Arts/The Art of Alternatives,” an international artist conference held at the Commodore Ballroom in 1986, which coincided with Expo ’86 in Vancouver. UNIT/PITT also hopes to produce a transcript of the recordings as a free e-publication and PDF download.

University of British Columbia Library

$4900

This project will continue the digitization of the Uno Langmann Family collection of BC photographs begun in 2014. Already completed and available on UBC Open Collections are more than 7,900 images found in 77 albums and individual postcards. This proposed phase of the project will digitize 2,585 of the remaining 4,350 individual photographs from the first Langmann donation (including stereo-views, cabinet cards, albumen, silver gelatin, etc.) dating from the 1860s to 1948. New content will be added to the existing portal. The photographs depict British Columbia and are a mix of images by known photographers and the vernacular.

University of Northern British Columbia

$10,000

The Smokehouse Island Digital Repository Project will digitize lithics (stone tools), tool fragments, faunal remains, and other cultural artifacts dating back 1000+ years ago from the Smokehouse Island archaeological site located on the traditional territory of the Lake Babine First Nation (LBN).

University of the Fraser Valley Library

$3590.60

The UFV Library plans to digitize 80 titles from the Newman Western Canadian Cookbook Collection (NWCC). These titles all relate to British Columbia and are within the public domain. These titles will be added to the already digitized titles from the NWCC which are accessible in UFV’s institutional repository, HarvestIR. UFV has already digitized over 155 cookbooks from this collection. This proposed next stage of digitization will involve digitizing 80 new cookbooks resulting in approximately 7440 TIFF master digital files, 80 searchable multipage PDFs, and accompanying derivative files, XML metadata, and OCR text files for an estimated total of 223 GB of digital files.

University of Victoria Libraries

$15,000

Published in Victoria, B.C., The Victoria Daily Times was the leading rival newspaper to the Daily Colonist in the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Alongside their competitors, the Daily Times covered many of the same stories, but sometimes with radically different political and socio-economic perspectives.

The University of Victoria Libraries has already digitized the Daily Colonist newspaper from 1858-1980. Digitizing reels from the Daily Times from 1945-1958 would not only significantly augment and enhance the existing digital newspaper collection, but creates further impact by making additional historical resources freely open and available online for comparative study and research.

VIVO Media Arts Centre

$3490

Sara Diamond: Activism & Cultural Acts in Vancouver (1974-1994) will digitize and make freely available online 4 videotapes, 10 audio cassettes, 449 photo materials, and 858 documents and textural materials related to Diamond’s practice as activist, historian, and cultural worker in Vancouver over two decades.

Materials include Diamond’s unpublished writings and research, select organizational records for collectives or organizations she co/founded, and AV documentation, brochures, posters and writings related to her media productions and curated exhibitions.

These items provide important context to previously digitized video productions, situating them within her broader political activism and created through an intersectional lens.