Royal BC Museum digitizes First Nations photo and audio-visual collections with support from FortisBC

Jun 18, 2019

VICTORIA, B.C. – For staff in the Royal BC Museum’s Indigenous Collections and Repatriation department, some of their most meaningful work involves sharing materials in its care with members of Indigenous communities—often family of the cultural creators or of the people captured in photos or audio.

But when source materials are antiquated and fragile, poring over dog-eared old photos or playing open-reel audio tapes becomes challenging.

Happily, with sponsorship support from FortisBC, the museum has been able to digitize many of its ethnographic audio-visual and photo collections, a process that makes it far easier for family or community members to gain access to these materials, which often hold enormous cultural value—and very often personal significance, too.