Postmedia donates historic photographs to Vancouver Archives

The Vancouver Archives announced yesterday it will receive an estimated two million photographic negatives from the Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers — the largest donation in the history of the civil institution. The negatives date from the mid-1940s to 1995, when both newspapers transitioned to digital photography.

The donation from Postmedia Network, the newspaper group that owns the Vancouver Sun and Province, will more than double the Archives’ current collection of 1.6 million negatives.

The collection includes the work of the newspapers’ photographers and photojournalists, and offers a snapshot of the events, people and places covered by the papers. According to a Vancouver Sun article about the donation, “The collection documents every facet of life in Vancouver, from politics to people, entertainment to sports, buildings to cityscapes.” Also included in the newspaper collection is a file of 1942 negatives documenting Japanese internment camps in the interior during the Second World War.

Several decades ago, the Archives acquired about 9,500 Vancouver Sun photographs. This latest donation features shots mainly from the 1970s onward.

Digitization plans
Prior to this latest collection being accessible to the public, the card index that accompanies the negatives needs to be converted to digital form and uploaded to the Archives’ database. Staff will begin this process in 2018, and the first batch of photos will be made available in 2019.

As funding is made available, the photographic negatives will be digitized. In the meantime, once the card index is completed and descriptions are online, researchers and the public can request to view the negatives in the Archives’ Reading Room.

Right now, the Archives has almost 130,000 digitized photos on its website. (The preceding link may be slow to upload.) This year, the Archives hopes to add another 20,000 images online.

In July 2017, the Archives of Ontario announced it had become the repository for more than two million photographs of The Globe and Mail fonds.

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