BC History Digitization Program – 2024 Projects

5 (BC) Artillery Regiment RCA Foundation

$2696

This project will focus on the digitization of the David Clark, U.E., Pacific Coast Militia Rangers (PCMR) Collection. The collection includes 77 photos, 5 maps, seven training pamphlets (579 pages), 20 documents (100 pages), and a complete set of the Ranger Magazine (53 issues – 602 pages).

BC Labour Heritage Centre

$2071.74

B.C. Workers’ News began publishing as a labour and progressive newspaper in 1935. This project will digitize 497 issues of the newspaper and its subsequently renamed volumes between 1935 and 1947. The project includes approximately 4,000 pages.

Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

$6000

The proposed project is the digitization of Centre A’s 2004 symposium, Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas as part of the gallery’s 25th anniversary programming. The symposium was originally convened by Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions). Mutations <> Connections was an international symposium and exhibition project that brought together 25 curators and artists from Canada, US, UK, Australia, and Singapore whose work engaged with Asian diasporas from a transnational perspective. We will be digitizing physical material along with audio-visual recordings in both Mini Disk and CD format.

grunt gallery

$13,888

grunt gallery will digitize and make available online a collection of photographic and text documentation from eight annual performance series and a single one-off performance project from the 1990s, highlighting the diverse range of artistic practices, curatorial visions, critical topics, and powerful acts of BC-based performance present in archive.

Italian Cultural Centre

$8000

This project will digitize meeting minutes, membership rolls, meeting minutes, and ephemera from the Ray Culos Vancouver Society of Italians Collection, specifically content related to the activities of the Sons of Italy and the Lega femminile in the early 20th century. This content offers insight into the governance structures and activities of both recent and established Italian immigrants in Canada. The digital files and descriptive metadata will be made available online through both the Italian Culture Centre Society’s website and the SFU Library Digitized Collections website.

Kaatza Station Museum and Archives

$11,399

The project will provide staffing for the in-house digitization of 532 issues of the BC/Western Canadian Lumber Worker from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. The newspaper was produced by the Western Canada Regional Council of the forestry labour union, the International Woodworkers of America. This will be Phase 2 of a digitization project that will make all I.W.A. newspapers and photographs held by the Kaatza Historical Society available online through the Arca digital repository.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

$4000

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (Belkin Gallery) will digitize 95 video, film, and sound recordings, representing rare artworks, performance documentation, interviews, and event recordings captured on increasingly obsolete and difficult to access media. These formats include moving image film, magnetic video, and audio on both open reel and cassette forms. These recordings were created by a wide variety of artists such as Anna Banana, Roy Kiyooka, Helen Goodwin, Doris Shadbolt, Ed Varney, bp Nichol, bill bissett, and many more artists active in the 1960s to 1990s.

Museum of the Cariboo-Chilcotin

$3500

The Museum of the Cariboo-Chilcotin is excited to propose a project that focuses on digitizing our collection of Williams Lake Tribune newspaper, which are in broadsheet format. This will be the beginning of an ongoing digitization project that will take place over the course of several years and focus on one decade at a time, starting with 1950-1959, with an approximate page count of 3,081 broadsheet sized pages. These are the museum’s oldest and most brittle newspapers in the collection and in broadsheet format. The project will commence late spring/early summer of 2024.

Nelson Museum, Archives and Gallery

$3957

The project is to digitize the pages of eight years and five months of the Nelson Daily News newspaper from December 1, 1968 to April 30, 1977. All 35 copy microfilm reels with provided from Nelson Museum’s microfilm collection. 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.

North Vancouver District Public Library

$13,000

The North Shore News is a treasured community resource and a strong, sustained voice for journalism locally-made in BC. The newspaper has been connecting North and West Vancouver since 1969, providing residents of all ages with information on local opportunities, entertainment, and relevant community information. The purpose of this project, coordinated by North Vancouver District Public Library, is to complete the digital archive of the North Shore News by adding issues from 2001-2022 and making the full archive available on the ARCA platform.

South Asian Studies Institute

$5000

The proposed project aims to digitize, preserve, and provide open access to the Dr. Gurdev Singh Gill fonds in the South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (https://sacda.ca/). The fonds consists of 1.2 linear feet of archival records of Dr. Gill, a medical doctor and the first South Asian to graduate from the University of British Columbia’s medical school in the 1950s. Dr. Gill is a tireless community activist who held leadership positions across various community and transnational organisations that advocated for social justice and equity of marginalised communities in BC. The archival records were created and collected by Dr. Gill and cover the period from  1916-1990s. The fonds includes diverse materials including handwritten notes, correspondence, reports, flyers, and administrative records of the organizations Dr. Gill has been actively part of, including Vancouver Khalsa Diwan Society, Indo Canadian Friendship Society of BC, and India Cultural Center of Canada.

Squamish Public Library

$8252

The Squamish Public Library is in the process of moving to a new archival platform, BiblioBoard. The first phase of the project, moving our existing digital archives to BiblioBoard, has been completed. The second phase will be digitizing and uploading files to the platform. The files being prepared to be digitized, and uploaded, are from the local newspaper, The Squamish Chief. The project will digitize 1,150 newspaper editions and approximately 500 photographs from The Squamish Chief spanning the years 1990-2023.

SS Master Society

$15,000

The project will create a 3D photorealistic, digital model inside and out of the historic steam tug Master. This digitalization will complement and support the ultimate objective of a full restoration of this iconic century-old BC ship.

Swedish Heritage in British Columbia

$3143.50

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. SHBC proposes the digitization of Svenska Pressen (Swedish Press), a Vancouver based Swedish-language newspaper published continuously since 1928. The scope of this project will be to digitize 1,200 broadsheet editions (about 5,300 pages total), spanning 1932 to 1954, representing our archive’s most requested and most vulnerable volumes. This is a subset of a more comprehensive collection, going up to the year 2012, transferred to us by former publisher Anders Neumüller.

UBC Herbarium

$15,000

To 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. Eastham’s collection includes nearly 7,000 collected, pressed and dried plant specimens, 3,500 pencil annotations (notes) on other plants specimens and 550 letters to botanical experts from around the world relating to the specimens. In the 1st phase of this project, the aim is to image 3,500 specimens, 1,750 annotations and 225 letters.

University of Victoria Libraries

$13,072

Published in Victoria, the 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.

Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre

$3099.53

This project focuses on digitization and access of textual records in the Peter Oberlander collection held by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Peter Oberlander was an Austrian-Jewish refugee from Nazi persecution who was interned as an ‘enemy alien’ in the United Kingdom and Canada. He settled in Canada after his release and was the founding director of UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning and the Centre for Human Settlements; his daughter Wendy Oberlander is an artist active in Vancouver.

Vancouver Public Library

$13,000

Artray was a commercial photography studio active in Vancouver in the 1930s-1950s. VPL obtained copyright for these negatives when they were donated in the 1970s. The project plan is to digitize 2000 medium-format negatives from the Artray collection. Earlier phases of digitization focused on buildings, industry interiors and exteriors, and streets. This proposed next phase of digitization will add some dynamism and vitality to the existing online collection with a selection of images of fashion, furniture and food well as photos of parties and beloved local events such as the Pacific National Exhibition.

Western Front and First Nations Summit

$15,000

The First Nations Summit has completed Phase I to digitize 3,685 paper legacy files from 1991 – 2018 and will now initiate Phase II to digitize 550 VHS tapes from 1990 – 2009. The VHS tapes record the full meetings of the First Nations Summit for the first 20 years of the modern treaty negotiations process that resulted from the tripartite 1991 BC Claims Task Force Report. In these formative meetings, chiefs and council, chief negotiators, and other leaders discussed the treaty process as it was built and evolved, along with other vital, sensitive, and sometimes confidential topics in First Nations communities.