British Columbia Regional Digitized History (B.C.R.D.H) is the evolution of the Digitized Okanagan History (D.O.H.) project, which was conceived of as a unique regional partnership involving the University of British Columbia's Okanagan Campus Library and numerous community memory institutions. D.O.H. was renamed British Columbia Regional Digitized History in February 2020 to reflect the expansion of the project to include a new aggregate collection: Kootenay/Columbia Digitized History.

Our archivists, Paige and Chris, have written an article highlighting the collaborative nature of D.O.H. for the March edition of BCLA Perspectives, a publication by the BC Library Association.

Our student staff allow us to continue to enhance access to the rich history of the Okanagan region by elevating the discoverability and accessibility of the region’s archival resources. Over the course of the summer, our graduate co-op student Allison was instrumental in helping grow the DOH repository. Allison made an informative video highlighting their experience working with DOH. During their time on the project, they helped us upload over 20,000 digitized items to the DOH repository!

The summer is starting to wind down here at Digitized Okanagan History, and we’re proud to say we’ve completed a significant amount of digitization work over the last few months.

Digitization this Summer

This summer we have prepared over 20,000 individual objects and pages for upload! These materials are full of valuable local history that will be of great interest to researchers and residents of the Okanagan.

Please keep an eye on our website over the next few weeks as we share the:

On June 1, 2018, the Digitized Okanagan History project team and our community partners met for a full day of learning and discussion at UBC Okanagan. It was an opportunity to provide updates on the project and to outline our vision for future work together. A total of 39 people participated in the event representing 19 memory institutions throughout the Okanagan Valley.

With summer on its way we are getting ready for another busy intake season at the Okanagan Region Historical Digitization Project!

I’m the “Geek Squad” of our project: as a computer science student, it’s my task to scope out the digital records and scanned documents of the community repositories we visit, and migrate these to an Excel spreadsheet so that our team can easily check and supplement their records for items they’ve scanned. Every museum has unique holdings, and the time it can devote to scanning and archival description depends upon its staff and financial resources. Some museums run on volunteers, whereas others have professional archivists.

Due to the nature of the project, the biggest requirement for the equipment to be purchased was that everything needed to be easily packed up and transportable from place to place. At the same time, however, we did not want to sacrifice being able to capture high-quality scans in favour of portability. After some research, we settled on the following equipment which combines quality and portability:

Funded by a donation from a private B.C.-based foundation and based out of the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia, the ORHDP was created to improve the accessibility of historical documents and photographs found in museums and archives in B.C.’s Southern Interior by scanning them and putting them online. To do this, a mobile digitization lab was formed, comprised of two laptops, two flatbed scanners, one book scanner, and four enthusiastic UBC students. Learn more about the project.