UBC faculty, staff and students can now access the digital archives of The Province newspaper from 1894 to 2010. As one of Vancouver’s two major daily newspapers, The Province digital archives will be a valuable new source for scholarship and teaching, further expanding UBC Library’s already extensive collection of current and historical British Columbian newspapers.
The Province was originally launched in 1894 as a weekly publication based in Victoria, BC, before operations were moved to Vancouver and the newspaper started daily publication as the Vancouver Daily Province on March 26, 1898. Over the last century, The Province has undergone several notable transformations. Until 1949, it boasted the largest circulation in the city of Vancouver, until it was unseated by the Vancouver Sun due to a printers’ strike that lasted 41 months. In 1957, it shifted from an evening to a morning paper, and in 1983, it switched to a tabloid format.
“The Province is really the BC paper of record for the first half of the 20th century,” says Keith Bunnell, Reference and Collections Librarian at in the Humanities & Social Sciences Division at Koerner Library. “We haven’t had electronic access to a Vancouver paper. It was difficult for researchers to use the microfilm as there was only very limited indexing and the index, produced by the Legislative Library, was itself on microfim.”
The Province digital archives are fully searchable and available remotely to UBC Library users with a CWL through Index and Databases and the library catalogue.
This project is part of UBC Library’s strategic direction to create and deliver responsive collections.
Learn more about our Strategic Framework.
