New Digital Collection: “Vancouver Archives Puts Thousands of Heritage Photos Online”

From the Vancouver Courier:

Vancouver heritage junkies, local history buffs and nosy neighbours, your cries have been heard. In an ambitious undertaking, staff at the City of Vancouver Archives have been busy digitizing nearly 7,000 black-and-white 35mm negatives — taken in 1978 and 1986 as part of two separate heritage surveys — for the public to access, ogle and explore online.
It’s a treasure trove of images, documenting thousands of Vancouver heritage homes at time when few considered a house’s heritage. According to city archivist Heather Gordon, the archives has been digitizing its photographic holdings since 1997, mostly through grants and donations from groups such as Friends of the Vancouver City Archives. Digitizing the heritage inventory from 1978 and 1986 is part of the archives’ 2017 grant from the B.C. History Digitization Program.
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There are approximately 6,900 images in all — a third are from 1978, and two thirds were taken from 1985 and 1986, when the Vancouver Heritage Advisory Committee hired work students to take photos and document pre-1950s homes and structures around the city. While the 1978 survey focused solely on houses, the 1986 survey was expanded to include monuments, churches, community centres and lots.
Gordon expects the archives will have most of the photos from the heritage surveys digitized and online by the end of the month. It’s a large dump of images, but a small fraction of the 1.6 million photographs the archives has in its holdings. By the end of this project, Gordon says the archives will have put close to 125,000 objects online.

View the Digitized Images
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See Also: City of Vancouver Archives Website

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