[BCMA] Community History Made Accessible

[Moderated BCMA subscriber listserv.]

For Immediate Release









Community History made Accessible



Curious to know what waterfront property in Roberts Creek went for in the 1950s? Have you ever wondered what the first year of Sea Cavalcade was like in 1969? How was filming of the Beachcombers first received by residents of Gibsons back in 1972?



These and other stories can now be found through a free online database provided by the Sunshine Coast Museum and Archives. The Newspaper Digitization Project was funded by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre’s B.C. History Digitization Project grant. The project will allow users to search through digitized archives of the Coast News newspapers using keywords or dates. Few other sources of historical information offer such a detailed lens into a community’s past or cover such a wide range of topics.

 Mid-way through the project, we learned of UBC Library’s BC Historical Newspapers website and inquired about the possibility of adding our collection of Coast News to their site. The process has been a great learning experience and with the support of UBC Library Digital Initiatives team and Glassford Press Ltd., the site will be up and running on August 1st.  

For this first phase of the project we focused on the Coast News in most urgent need of preservation (1945-1976, 1983-1987, and 1989). The 1,924 digitized issues span 37 years, from the very first issue in July 1945 up until 1989. Future phases of the project will see the remainder of the Coast News, along with other local papers, added to the database. 

The project involved the scanning of microfilm from BC Archives. Publications were then separated into single page files and sent to UBC Library, where they were uploaded onto an innovative and user-friendly database. The publications are fully searchable and browsable; single pages can be downloaded in the JPEG format, while entire issues are downloadable as PDFs.

On August 11th, from 1pm to 3pm, there will be an Open House at the Museum to officially launch the site.  Museum staff will give a presentation on the project and demonstrate how the site works.   

Go to our website for a link to the Sunshine Coast Newspaper Digitization Project: www.sunshinecoastmuseum.ca

Contact:

Kimiko Hawkes

Manager/Curator

Sunshine Coast Museum & Archives

604-886-8232

scma_manager at dccnet.com

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